Toilet theology

When I was growing up, a few things were consistent: Velveeta® Shells and Cheese, quiet tables, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

The Bathroom Reader series is designed specifically with reading while sitting on the toilet in mind. According to the Wikipedia article, “Their volumes contain information on subjects such as quotes, dumb criminals, palindromes, anagrams, urban legends and hoaxes, failed inventions, the history of everyday things, and accidental discoveries, as well as articles on pop culture and ‘celebrities’… Throughout the books, there are what the BRI calls ‘running feet’ — short fun facts on the bottom of each page.”

All of this is to say that I was conditioned from a young age to read in the restroom. I don’t remember too much religion or theology in the Bathroom Readers, but that’s where A Theological Miscellany: 176 Pages of Odd, Merry, Essentially Inessential Facts, Figures, and Tidbits about Christianity comes in.

A Theological Miscellany is the perfect theological commode companion. Among the “176 Pages of odd, merry, essentially inessential facts, figures, and tidbits about Christianity”, you’ll find Famous Physically Disabled or Handicapped Christians, Church Announcement “Bloopers”, and Reformers Before the Reformation, among many others. I picked up my copy at Half Price Books for a scant $4.

If you can’t go number two without reading about the Holy One, this is the book for you. Plus, it’ll surely start some conversations when you have guests over.

Serendipitous stock image sighting

This is totally geeky, but as I was wandering around Barnes & Noble today, the book Please Stop Laughing at Me caught my eye, and it only took me a second to realize why. As you can see by the image above, it was because the same stock image is also used for the cover of Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry by Andrew Root.

I did a brief search at a couple of stock image sites for the image, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe you’ll have better luck (wink, wink). Has anyone else ever noticed the same stock image used for two different products?

The 123 book meme

Scott from Transformatum has tagged me in the popular “123″ or “closest book” meme, which has been around for a really long time (I remember seeing it on Marko’s blog in ‘06), even though it’s been spreading like wildfire as of late [UPDATE: Looks like I was tagged by Jeremy a couple weeks ago… whoops]. Anyway, here’s how it works.

(1) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating! (2) Turn to page 123. (3) Find the first 5 sentences. (4) Post the next 3 sentences. (5) Tag 5 people.

Here goes:

I will revisit the pain of my mother’s forgiveness in chapter 6. My father never talked about how it felt forgiving a person who killed his boy; he never talked much about how anything felt, though he was a deeply sensitive man. But that forgiveness must have cost him a great deal too, possibly no less that it cost my mother.

The passage is from the book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, by Croatian-American theologian Miroslav Volf, which was sitting on my bed (right behind me). Those three sentences actually provide a lot of insight into how Volf does theology - often through anecdotes and achingly honest personal narrative.

I tag b.mick, Bruce, Jonathan, Matt, and Jim. You’re it.

Poll: Amazon Wishlists*

Do you have an Amazon Wishlist? Participate in the poll below and let the world know (RSS readers, you’ll have to visit the site to cast your vote)!

I’ve had my Amazon Wishlist since August 2005 (at least, that’s when my first item was added). I love it - adding books to my Wishlist is almost as thrilling as actually buying them. Anyway, here’s a sampling of books I’ve added in the last couple of weeks:

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright

A Theological Miscellany : 160 Pages of Odd, Merry, Essentially Inessential Facts, Figures, and Tidbits about Christianity by T.J. McTavish

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich

Now what are you waiting for? Take the poll! ↴

*My name is Jake Bouma, and I approve this message.

• Jim Wallis, the author of God’s Politics and head honcho of Sojourners, tells us why he wrote his new book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (@ Amazon). “The Great Awakening speaks of two great hungers in our world today—the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice. I believe that the connection between the two is one the world, and especially a new generation, is waiting for.” 01/18/2008

Interview with Tony Jones, author of “The New Christians” (Part 2)

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

The following is Part 2 (Part 1) of an interview with Tony Jones about his forthcoming book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (to be released March 3, 2008). Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village, and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Find out more at Tony’s website.

JAKE BOUMA: Going off of your last answer, what role has electronic media - especially the internet and blogging - played in both the shaping of the emergent phenomenon and the process of your writing this book?

TONY JONES: This cannot be overstated. Emerging technology (cell phones, the Internet, email, etc) have made the kind of connection that we’re after possible. It goes without saying that face-to-face connection is still essential, but church leaders of previous generations could not have imagined the kind of connections that we have today. I communicate with thousands of leaders every week by various means, and these communications have absolutely nothing to do with traditional denominational or confessional demarcation. This is a new era.

JAKE BOUMA: What role did your stint in youth ministry play in getting you to think about or become involved in emergent?

TONY JONES: It’s no mistake that many of the emergent leaders were formerly youth workers. Church-based youth ministry is a fertile training ground for so much that is emergent: risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, pushing boundaries, getting in trouble :-), staying up-to-date on culture, etc. All of this has influenced the genesis of emergent.

JAKE BOUMA: As you mentioned earlier, your book draws upon insights from what’s happening “on the ground” in actual emergent churches in what you call “dispatches”. Do you have a favorite or particularly memorable “dispatch”?

TONY JONES: Well, I loved writing about Solomon’s Porch — the church I attend — and that comes right at the end of the book; it’s kind of a coda to the whole book. And each of the “dispatches” that come between chapters is significant to me. Honestly, it’d be hard for me to pick a favorite…

JAKE BOUMA: A recent post on presbymergent titled A Challenge to Emergent Authors raised the following question, among others: “In the emergent conversation, are we writing the things we’re writing because we want to sell books, or are we writing the things we’re writing because we want to change the world?” How would you respond?

TONY JONES: I’ve read that post, and there are some really good points therein. There are also some naive misconceptions about the publishing industry. I see it like this: print publishing is an important way to vet one’s ideas in the broader culture. Of course, Joel Osteen sells a lot of books, so sales does not necessarily equal quality. But the ideas of emergent have been out there in the public square through books and blogs an conferences, and, as a result of the feedback (good and bad), we’ve all become better thinkers and practitioners. In the early days, many of us were committed to publishing everything for free on the Internet. But, at this point, that is just not feasible. For instance, many colleges, universities, and graduate schools do not allow students to footnote websites. You see, having a book printed lends the ideas therein credibility…at least for now.

JAKE BOUMA: Finally, what’s next on the plate for both yourself and Emergent Village? Do you have another book on the horizon? Any emergent events or a book tour (or anything) you want to plug for 2008? Thanks for participating in this interview!

TONY JONES: We’re doing some imagining around EV about the future. It might become more public, or it might go underground. We don’t really know. We’ve got a couple of great theological events coming next fall, and you can read about them at www.emergentvillage.com. Doug Pagitt, Mark Scandrette, and I will be on tour for our books all summer, so watch for that. And I’m currently writing a little book on the Didache, a very early Christian document that didn’t quite make the Bible. Thanks for having me!

Return to Part 1 of the interview »

Interview with Tony Jones, author of “The New Christians” (Part 1)

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

The following is Part 1 (Part 2) of an interview with Tony Jones about his forthcoming book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (to be released March 3, 2008). Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village, and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Find out more at Tony’s website.

JAKE BOUMA: Tell the readers a little about yourself - education, ministry experience, family life, etc. How did you get from baby Tony J. to the author of “The New Christians”?

TONY JONES: I grew up in Edina, Minnesota, the same town where I now reside. My parents were (are) great people who were faithful, but didn’t take their faith too seriously. And I mean that in a good way. So many of my friends in ministry grew up in homes that were spiritually toxic. Not me. My parents are highly educated, well-rounded people. They highly valued education and made sure that my brothers and I were serious about school.

We went to a great church — a funny hybrid of mainline and evangelical Protestantism, and I was very involved there growing up. I went to everything. And that church had a great stance on letting kids move into leadership positions early, so I was counseling camp and teaching Sunday school, etc., even when I was in junior high. From there I went to Dartmouth College and immediately to Fuller Seminary, a journey that I recount in my latest book (The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier).

After seminary, I was a missionary for three years, working primarily with Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Then I took the job as minister to youth and young adults at my home church. It was there that I hooked up with Doug Pagitt and some of the other early emergent leaders. Honestly, my life hasn’t been the same since. This book is a record of our thoughts and activities over the past ten years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Best of 2007

I am pleased to present the second annual JakeBouma.com “Best of” list. Feel free to argue with my choices in the comments. Here’s the list for 2006.

1. Army of Me - Citizen
2. Matt Nathanson - Some Mad Hope
3. Andy Davis - Let the Woman
4. Anberlin - Cities
5. Kanye West - Graduation
Honorable Mention: Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger, The Alternate Routes - Good and Reckless and True, Eric Hutchinson - Sounds Like This, William Fitzsimmons - Goodnight

1. Once
2. Atonement
3. Bourne Ultimatum
4. 3:10 to Yuma
5. Sweeny Todd
Honorable Mention: Ratatouille, American Gangster, I Am Legend, Oceans 13, No Country for Old Men

1. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From A Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation by Andrew Root (Review forthcoming)
2. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James K. A. Smith
3. Everything Must Change by Brian McLaren
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
5. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr (Review forthcoming)
Honorable Mention: The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, The Primal Teen by Barbara Strauch

1. Chicago Cubs games
2. Heroes
3. Man Vs. Wild
4. The Colbert Report
5. Project Runway

1. Google Reader (seriously, I live a different life because of it)
2. Twitter
3. Bleed Cubbie Blue
4. IAmJoshBrown
5. Rethinking Youth Ministry

• I opened a new Twitter account at http://twitter.com/jbquotes to post short quotes from whatever book I am currently reading. Actually, I set up an entire “quote blog” a long time ago, but it never really got off the ground. Heck, let’s make this fun: I will give $10 via PayPal to the first person who finds my secret quote blog and contacts me with the correct URL. UPDATE: Scott (from Transformatum) is the winner, by finding http://www.jakebouma.com/quotes/. Nice work. 12/11/2007

The Primal Teen: Book review

The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids

I first heard about Barbara Strauch’s The Primal Teen from Mark Oestreicher (a.k.a. ysmarko) on his blog, and then in person when he plugged it during his seminar on middle school ministry at the 2007 National Youth Workers Convention.

The basic premise of the entire book is that new findings in the field of neuroscience (scientific study of the brain) are proving that many stereotypes and/or assumptions about adolescents have a biological foundation. “Teenagers may, indeed, be a bit crazy,” says Strauch in the Introduction, “but they are crazy according to a primal blueprint; they are crazy by design” (xiv).

Analyzed in light of recent scientific findings are many of the things traditionally associated with adolescence, such as impulsiveness, out-of-character and shady behavior, experimentation (drugs, sex, etc.), raging hormones, puppy love, sleeping too much, and so on. Many of these things have something to do with the prefrontal cortex, which is essentially the decision-making and impulse-resisting center of the brain. Adolescent bodies develop faster than the adolescent prefrontal cortex, and although a “teenager may outwardly look like a mountain of maturity to us… it’s an illusion” (36).

There’s a lot of great stuff in this book. If you’ve ever been puzzled by a teenager and asked the question “Why on earth does s/he do that!?”, this book has a lot of answers. It challenges us to look at adolescence as more than an awkward stage of bodily growth and social unrest; adolescence, scientists are finding, is period in which brain development rivals that of early childhood.

As a professional youth worker, I highly recommend this book, both to fellow youth workers and parents alike. For youth workers, you’ll see your job in a whole new way. In addition to encouraging kids in the Way of Jesus, we’ll begin to see our ministry as vital to the biological development of adolescents. The implications here are huge. Things we do (and the way we do them) in youth ministry will not only affect the rest of teenagers’ lives spiritually, they will affect the rest of their lives biologically - we are, quite literally, molding their brains.

I have just one caveat. The book was published in 2003, which means most of the research and interviews were likely conducted in 2002 and before. As we approach 2008, this book nears its fifth birthday, and five years in the field of neuroscience is a LONG time. So the book is a bit dated, but it’s still relevant. As far as I know, there haven’t been any similar (and similarly accesible) books since The Primal Teen was published.

I’d like to end this review with a quote in the book from an 18 year old guy named Stuart which I think accurately sums up the book. He says,

I think one of the biggest changes I notice is that my mind seems to see things in a more complex, complicated kind of way now… It’s like for the first time, my brain can ask “what if” (202).

May we be courageous enough to encourage adolescents to ask “what if”. Their biological development may depend on it.

The “Thirty pages per day” project

Although I love reading, I am a notoriously bad reader. This somewhat paradoxical statement has led me to develop the “Thirty pages per day” project.

My stack of “to read” books is growing and I’m barely making a dent. I have maybe five or six books that I’ve started and not finished, and in a couple of those I am at least halfway through. Perhaps it’s built into my personality as an Enneagram type seven: “[Type sevens have a] tendency to believe that something better awaits them, [which] makes them reluctant to narrow down their options or to pursue their aims with true devotion.”

Regardless, the “Thirty pages per day” project is my personal attempt to overcome my reading deficiencies. The process is pretty straightforward: read thirty pages per day from the same book until completion and move on to the next book. This will both help to develop a discipline of reading in my daily schedule and make a bigger dent in my stack of books.

If I remain faithful to the project for an entire year without skipping any days (unlikely), I will have read a total of 10,950 pages. Assuming the average book is 300 pages long (a rather generous assumption, I presume), that amounts to 36.5 books.

I think I might use a productivity secret from Jerry Seinfeld to help me in the project. To ensure he does his task of writing every day, Jerry hangs a big wall calendar and draws a red “X” through every day that he has completed his task. The goal is then to get a long chain of Xs, which encourages you to keep going to avoid breaking the chain. While writing this post I even discovered the website www.dontbreakthechain.com, an online version of Jerry’s concept.

I’ve heard similar projects, like 52 books in 52 weeks, but does anyone else use some sort of program like this to guide their reading habits?

Blogging through a book: Everything Must Change (Part 1)

This is part one of a series where I blog through my reading of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. The entire series is listed below ↴

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Conclusions

In this first section of the book, McLaren delivers the rhetorical device that will shape (I presume) the rest of the book. He asks, “What do the life and teachings of Jesus have to say about the most critical global problems in the world today” (12)?

In response to this question, McLaren makes a two-fold point: (1) Christians (and followers of the other “big” world religions) have failed to address the world’s most pressing crises because (2) the church has either focused all of its energy and attention on ideological debates (playing the “blame game”), or the church has become too “specialized” — or both.

You only have to have a passing familiarity with Jesus and his message to know there was a special place in his heart for the poor and oppressed. Why, then, has the church been so unsuccessful in addressing the issues of povery and oppression?

“We seemed polarized by our ideological diagnoses of the causes and cures of poverty, and even worse, we were paralyzed by our polarization, and so the poor continued to suffer - trapped by their poverty and our polarizing, paralyzing arguments about poverty” (16).

We’re too caught up in pointing fingers and debating who/what our fingers should be pointed at that we have failed to make any substantive progress.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging through a book: Everything Must Change (Intro)

This is the introduction of a series where I blog through my reading of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. The entire series is listed below ↴

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Conclusions

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging through Brian McLaren’s new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

If you’ve heard things about Brian McLaren (good or bad) and wondered what all the fuss is about, hopefully this series will answer some questions for you. It will also facilitate my own reflection on the book and I hope that it will generate some healthy dialogue on this site.

Everything Must Change is divided into eight sections, each consisting of four chapters, and my plan is to write a post after every section I read.

In the short introduction of the book, entitled “Hope Happens”, McLaren reassures us that he can help the reader “understand some highly complex material and make it not only accessible but maybe even interesting and inspiring” (1). I have no doubt he’ll deliver on his promise; he’s a skilled crafter of words to be sure.

After introducing himself, McLaren presents us with the book’s thesis:

“People interested in being a new kind of Christian will inevitably begin to care more and more about this world [as opposed to the “other world” of heaven], and they’ll want to better understand its most significant problems, and they’ll want to find out how they can fit in with God’s dreams actually coming true down here more often” (4).

These “significant problems”, or global crises, can be traced to “four deep dysfunctions”: the prosperity crisis (environmental breakdown & unsustainable global economy); the equity crisis (gap between socioeconomic classes); the security crisis (war fueled by cultural/economic resentment); and the spirituality crisis (world religion’s failure to provide healing), which McLaren says is the “leverage point through which we can reverse the first three” (5).

I’m really looking forward to digging through this book.

The World Without Us

I just ordered a book entitled The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, an “enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow [which] explores what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like.”

The book and its author have been getting a lot of press lately, and not just because envisioning the future of the planet sans humanity is a fascinating topic for a book. Weisman even appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart recently.

Even if you’re not inclined to buy the book, the book’s website has a lot of cool multimedia that you can mess around with, including two videos: the first is a video slideshow of New York City without humans over the course of 15,000 years (I am immediately thinking about I Am Legend); and the second is an animation entitled Your House Without You.

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about the book, Salon has a great review. I hope to write a review when I am finished with it as well.

• Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics and CEO of Sojourners, presents us with his back to school reading list. 08/30/2007

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