- I found it nearly impossible to read John Caputo’s latest article in Tikkun Magazine without connecting it to LOST. “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens. The name of God makes the present a space troubled by an immemorial past and an unforeseeable future.” HT: Tony Jones and Blake Huggins 05/24/2010
What is emerging? Simplicity.
April 19th, 2010 | In an attempt to scratch the surface of the question “What is emerging?” I’d like to unabashedly tweak a few words from a recent blog post by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
In his post, Shirky summarizes his consultation to TV executives about the future of their industry in the internet age. Below, I’ve taken the last several paragraphs of his post and altered some phrasing here and there to make it read like he’s answering church leaders about the future of the Church in an internet/postmodern/late-modern world. Any changed I’ve made are italicized (I mostly changed “video” to “church”).
—————————————
In the future, at least some methods of being the church will become as complex [think denominational organization], with as many details to attend to, as church has today, and people will doubtless make pots of money on those forms of church. It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That’s not how it works, however.
Some church organizations still have to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old church ecoystem, where the church had to be complex simply to be the church, is broken. Expensive and expansive things made in complex ways now compete with cheap things made in simple ways. For example, the YouTube video Charlie Bit My Finger was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
JakeBouma.com is a half decade old
I know, it’s been a while.1
Today is a special day, though, because it has now been a half decade since the day I purchased the JakeBouma.com domain name for the purpose of blogging. This post from the third birthday has a fun little history (for serious JakeBouma.comophiles only).
But seriously, why the lack of posting?
Aside from the gravitational pull of sites like Twitter and Posterous (mostly Twitter), there’s the fact that I’ve been slowly working on a book proposal.2 That means two things: 1) Much of my free time is spent reading, researching, and writing stuff that has to do with the proposal, and 2) A great portion of the stuff I would blog about — especially around topics like youth ministry, theology, social theory, and philosophy — I feel the need to keep “secret” until I know whether or not it will ever actually materialize in book form.3
So although I haven’t been around this here blog much, I have doing blog-worthy things. Which kind of sucks for you, I guess. Sorry. But the good news is that I just renewed JakeBouma.com for two more years. Which is kind of awesome for you, I guess.
Hey, while I’ve got you — you should check out a few things.
In late January I was a guest on Tim Schmoyer’s Live YM Talk, discussing “The need for theological questioning in youth ministry”. It’s runs about 50 minutes, and you can check it out here.
And earlier this week I was a guest on Andy Root’s online radio show talking about his new book The Promise of Despair (which I have said should be a top priority read if you’re invested in the future of the church). This one’s only 15 minutes long, and you can listen here. I’ve been told that I may receive a $10 Olive Garden gift card if my episode has the most listens, so…
Long story short: I miss you, and I’m told (some of) you miss me. Hang in there.
In closing, here’s a picture of Philip Clayton.
- For the record, the “someone I’ve never met” was Mitch McGinnis. Mitch — If you’re reading this, sorry for blocking you on Twitter. ↩
- And, no, the title isn’t The Speed of Light: Intergalactic Space Travel in Youth Ministry. ↩
- This doesn’t mean I haven’t dropped a few juicy hints here and there. ↩
- The Advent Community and the Emergence of God’s Dream for Creation by Troy Bronsink. “I have observed four theologies that are undergoing reimagination by emergent congregations: ecclesiology, eschatology, missiology, and incarnation. From the vantage point of these emergent theologies, I want to illuminate four metaphors from these texts that reimage preaching in Advent: an ecclesiology of the unfinished way, an eschatology of trade in seeds that will find future purchase in God’s coming dreams, a missiology in which language and symbols are reconceived by the Holy Spirit, and an incarnational theology of ordinary watching and witnessing.” (HT: Soupiset) 12/21/2009
Advent explorations: Chapter 2 of Harold Schweizer’s “On Waiting”
Chapter two of Schweizer’s On Waiting uses as its framework one of philosopher Henri Bergson’s experiments to begin building a philosophy of waiting.
Bergson, “in order to demonstrate the existence of a time other than abstract, mathematical time,”1 performs the following thought experiment:
If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.
Let me first say that it is nearly impossible to convey the eloquence of Schweizer’s prose and the brilliance of his insights without quoting the whole chapter. He is a skilled wordsmith, to be sure. That being said, I want to briefly explore two concepts that Schweizer begins to develop in this chapter.
The first is the dichotomy between time and duration. In the sugar/water experiment, Bergson makes the claim that the time waiting for the sugar to dissolve is not time in the mathematical sense (tick… tock… 1… 2…), but rather duration, over which one has no control. In waiting, time is not something we stand in relationship to, but something that we embody. “In waiting,” Schweizer says,
time no longer seems to serve as a transparent medium or instrument, it is no longer something external to which the waiter could refer, from which he would be separate, of which he could avail himself, through which he could pass to accomplish something, as when one takes a leisurely hour to have lunch. In waiting, the hour cannot be turned into lunch; the waiter must live the hour, feel it, embody it.2
It is important to understand what Schweizer is doing here, because there is this thing we call waiting which is not really waiting at all. We wait for our oil change to be done. We wait for the nurse to call us out of the waiting room. We wait for packages to arrive in the mail. We wait for. And when we wait for, time is simply an object, a relation. But when we wait outside of “that mathematical time” we experience time as duration — we experience time absolutely. As Bergson says, “It is we who are passing when we say time passes.”3
Which brings us to the second point. When time is experienced as duration, a whole new world is opened to us — a new world which makes us decidedly uncomfortable. Schweizer makes the argument that time as duration exposes us to our own duration, our mortality: “The waiter’s momentary intuition of her own duration — as this occurs, for example, when we suddenly, but always only intermittently, hear our heartbeat — is accompanied by a certain uncanny discomfort…. She would rather think than feel time.”4
Waiting is hellish precisely because it forces us to confront our own death, not because there are simply more ticks and tocks left to do their ticking and tocking.
And so in Advent, we wait. We confront our own death and the death of all and cry out to God, asking to be saved from our enduring hell. We cry “O Come, Emmanuel!” because waiting, confronting our seemingly inevitable demise, is unbearable.
We are not waiting for the time to pass until Christ is born and the herald angels begin their song and the whole blessed celebration begins. We are not waiting for. We are enduring. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.
- Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. New York: Routledge, 2008. 15. The “abstract, mathematical time” is a reference to Isaac Newton’s idea of time. ↩
- Ibid., 17. ↩
- Interesting side note: In 1913 Bergson was denounced by the Pope. His philosophy was considered “false,” “destructive,” and “poisonous” because it was “sugar-coated, subtle, and seductive in nature.” I’ll know I’ve made it when I’m denounced by the Pope. ↩
- Ibid., 21. ↩
I’m giving away two copies of “Watch For The Light”
During this season of Advent I have been blessed by a fantastic book titled Watch For The Light: Readings For Advent And Christmas. It contains 45 pithy devotional reflections arranged in daily readings (from Nov. 24 — January 7) from some of Christianity’s all-time best thinkers. Perhaps you recognize some of these names: Henri Nouwen, Meister Eckhart, Dorothy Day, John Howard Yoder, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Annie Dillard, Jürgen Moltmann, Brennan Manning… the list goes on.
Anyway, in the spirit of giving, I would like to give two of these books away. Want to win one? Here’s what you need to do:
That’s it.
A couple of rules: The contest ends at 12:00pm (Central Time) on Thursday, December 17. You may only enter once, and winners will be chosen randomly by means of random.org. And in light of Wess’ recent post, both books will be purchased from Powell’s instead of Amazon.
Happy Advent!
- Is Advent Biblical? “But I’m not concerned merely with whether Advent is not disallowed in Scripture. I want to know if observing Advent is consistent with biblical themes and priorities. Is Advent biblical in this grander sense? Could the observance of Advent help one to grow in faith in a way that aligns with biblical faith?” 12/09/2009
Advent explorations: Chapter 1 of Harold Schweizer’s “On Waiting”
When I set out to do a personal study of Advent, I immediately performed a cursory Google search for “philosophy of waiting” hoping to find an essay or something to catalyze my thoughts on the topic. The search led me to Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting, a brilliant book from the Thinking In Action series from Routledge. It was, in an almost eerie sense, the exact thing I was looking for. So I placed an order.
I am now slowly making my way through the book, and the plan is this: To post blog reflections on a chapter-by-chapter basis during the next couple of weeks.
On Waiting’s back cover promises that Schweizer’s work “examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon [of waiting] from diverse angles and in fascinating style,” and chapter one — “Nobody Likes to Wait” — wastes no time in fulfilling this assertion. Schweizer sets the stage thusly:
Although waiting rooms, train stations, airports, or hotel lobbies are merely to be passed through, I shall argue… that waiting is not simply a passage of time to be traversed… In waiting, time is slow and thick. Waiting is more than merely an inconvenient delay. It is more than a matter of time. Waiting has its rewards, as I want to argue here… And yet, we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.1
As a result of the Enlightenment’s lust for the quantifiable and absolute, somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century the concept of time became the primary organizing principle of society. It wasn’t long before people discovered that this reductionist version of “time” was something that could be exploited — time, we realized is money. But “what is lost,” Schweizer says, “when time is money is the content of time itself, but it is a content that seems inconceivable without economic determinations or measurements by clocks.”2 That is to say, time-is-money looks like time, but it doesn’t feel like time.
Schweizer next uses the rise of the train system and the resulting necessary synchronization of time between stations and trains to make a great point: “Time is synchronized only for those who have pocket watches.”3 Not knowing when a train leaves, or (even worse) knowing what time it leaves but not having the means to know what time it is now is a serious setback for those too poor to afford time-measuring devices. And lest we be content keeping this problem in the past, Schweizer reminds us that “waiting is still assigned to the poor and powerless so as to ritualistically reinforce social and political demarcations… The poor will always be with us; the poor will always wait. Their time is not money.”4
…Blessed are those who wait? Maybe so.
Schweizer then moves on to discussing the effects of the ubiquitous screen on waiting. Because I am never very far away from my laptop, and am almost always attached to my iPhone, the very act of waiting is nearly non-existent in my daily existence. It’s going to be a few minutes? No problem. I’ll just play a quick round of Drop 7. No need for me to just sit here. For Schweizer, the acceleration of new technology continues to compress space, which in turn makes waiting feel like an unwarranted and alien expansion of space. For us, waiting is nothing more than sheer tediousness.
Which is why, for Schweizer, the very act of waiting is subversive:
“By the divine standards of time’s exactitude, by the diviner economics of its consumption, by the light of speed, waiting must seem a temporary aberration, an anachronism, an embarassment. The person who waits is out of sync with time, outside of the ‘moral’ and economic community of those whose time is productive and synchronized or whose time need not — in the habit of velocity — be experienced at all. The waiter’s enforced passivity expels him from the community of productive citizens; his endurance of time estranges him from the culture of money and speed.”5
It is when we truly endure time that we wait, Schweizer argues. This form of waiting is never accompanied by the preposition “for” — waiting “for” this, or waiting “for” that. And it is this type of waiting that situates us decidedly outside of the “community of productive citizens.” When we wait, we send a message that says we are not held captive to a consumerist society, a society which worships at the altar of time-is-money.
It will be interesting to explore how Schweizer unpacks all of this in the coming chapters. I’m particularly keen to think through how his assertion that we can have “unexpected intuitions” when we practice waiting as enduring time and not waiting “for” (”objectless waiting,” as he calls it) can still have transformative power during Advent when it seems like we most decidedly are waiting “for” — for the coming of the Promised One.
Stay tuned.
- Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. New York: Routledge, 2008. 2. ↩
- Ibid., 4-5. ↩
- Ibid., 5. ↩
- Ibid., 6 ↩
- Ibid., 8. ↩
Audio interview with Andrew Root, author of “Relationships Unfiltered”
| Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships |  |
Last Friday I had the privilege of spending some time with Andrew Root (@RootAndrew on Twitter) on the campus of Luther Seminary in Minneapolis, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Youth and Family Ministry.
In addition to hanging out and attending one his classes, I was able to interview him about his newest book, Relationships Unfiltered. Relationships Unfiltered is sort of like a condensed, more practical, and less scholarly version of his first book, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, which I have called the “absolute best youth ministry book out there right now”. Although less heady than Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, Relationships Unfiltered definitely doesn’t disappoint.
Anyway, you can listen to the interview below and/or download it for listening on portable devices. Enjoy.
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Click here to download the interview in mp3 format [39 minutes | 17.1mb]
Click here to download the enhanced interview in m4a format [39 minutes | 34.5mb]
Advent explorations: Karl Rahner on Advent
Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984) on the Incarnation, from a short prayer/essay on Advent:
Contrary to all our fond hopes, you seized upon precisely this kind of human life and made it your own. And you did this not in order to change or abolish it, not so that you could visibly and tangibly transform it, not to divinize it. You didn’t even fill it to overflowing with the kind of goods that men are able to wrest from the small, rocky acre of their temporal life, and which they laboriously store away as their meager provision for eternity.
No, you took upon yourself our kind of life, just as it is. You let it slip away from you, just as ours vanishes from us. You held on to it carefully, so that not a single drop of its torments would be spilled. You hoarded its every fleeting moment, so you could suffer through it all, right to the end.
This comes from a fantastic little book called Watch For The Light: Readings For Advent And Christmas. Be on the lookout in the coming week for a giveaway of this book. :)
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