• Does Your Language Shape How You Think? Turns out that the old-ish idea that your mother tongue shapes your perception of the world is actually quite true – from the gender of forks to whether you write with your “south” or “right” hand. (See also the RadioLab episode about Words, which talks about the same thing.)
• Just How Broken is the Senate? Hilarious, and also truly sad article about the state of the U.S. Senate.

• An interview with Ken Myers (of Mars Hill Audio Journal, which I cannot possibly praise enough) from last year’s fall edition of Comment. In re-reading it, I find his suggestions to once again be immensely challenging.
  

  3. You believe individualism to be a corrosive, destructive force in the modern world. Do you have any suggestions for students who wonder how to live in way that is not individualistic in the context of today’s college or university?

  Some form of community is often prescribed as the antidote to individualism. But “community” involves more than getting together with a bunch of people just like you. So I would urge students to get involved as much as possible in the lives of people who are unlike them: different ages, different vocations, different stages in life. Local churches are (at least in theory) an ideal place for this, as long as the church doesn’t segregate students into the “student ministries.”

  Secondly, one of the great conveyors of individualism is the commodification of everything. Individualism goes hand-in-hand with the displacement of the idea of culture as a legacy or inheritance with that of culture as a set of sovereignly selected commodities. We now choose everything in our cultural life; we don’t simply receive anything. One way of fighting the mentality of individualism is to put oneself in a position where one is an apprentice, where one receives something offered rather than “consumes” it. For example, find someone (in that church community you’re a part of) who knows a lot about an ethnic food tradition and go to a restaurant with them, letting them choose the menu (and maybe you can even pay for their meal). Or find someone (a professor, even) who knows a lot about some artistic tradition that is foreign to you (German cinema, Renaissance choral music, English detective fiction) and apprentice yourself to them. You could do the same with master gardeners, cooks, bird watchers, woodworkers, motorcycle mechanics, even theologians. Yes, there is an initial act of individual choice, but submitting to someone else’s authority and expertise over time is a great way to fight the temptation to assert our own sovereignty.

• From the Guardian: “Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard“
• Steve Garber in the Art House America blog on “The Epistemology of Love“
• Several students have approached me about leading film conversations in different contexts on campus this year, so I’m looking back at the Arts & Faith Top 100 list. (I think Babette’s Feast may be first on my list.)
• Obama gets the new Franzen novel early, panic ensues. (I have checked Amazon basically every day hoping that the novel – which I preordered what seems like millenia ago – has shipped. It has not. I may be a little obsessed.)
• Kevin Spacey will be in the Bridge Project’s Richard III at BAM this winter – directed by Sam Mendes.
• David Brooks as public theologian?

In practical, hard-nosed American terms, freedom from necessity is good because it buys time, and time results in better decisions: “Maybe if kids take longer to choose their mates and their careers, they’ll make fewer mistakes and live happier lives.” This seems to be intended as the article’s most persuasive argument in favor of adopting emerging adulthood as a developmental phase. I don’t doubt that many adults wish in hindsight that their youth had lasted longer, but it’s not actually clear from such nostalgia and wistfulness that a longer youth would’ve resulted in a happier or wiser adulthood, assuming they ever made it to adulthood. Since time itself is not guidance in matters of marriage or vocation (especially if both are delayed because neither seem available or obviously worthwhile), 20-somethings may just take longer to make the same mistakes. Unless we believe that the longer one takes to make a decision, the better it will be (so people who marry at 90 are most likely to choose the best mates), we have to look to some other standard to determine the wisdom of such decisions.

Or maybe these past decisions were not mistakes at all? After all, the view that all previous decisions about marriage, work, and childrearing were wrong is the biggest assumption of this piece. What evidence do we have that the decisions people made in the past about these things were wrong?

Whether or not the decisions of the past were good or bad, however, we the twentysomethings have some kind of opportunity in front of us. How will we deal with the quarterlife crisis? (Rob addressed this in the latest print edition of Comment, but you’ll have to wait a month or so to read the actual piece online. That is, if you don’t subscribe. Which you should.)

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Up too early (3:30am EST) and will undoubtedly be up too late (TBD MST), but I sense good things are coming this week, even if I had to leave my trusty traveling buddy (Tom, obviously) at home this time.

Yet since I was a kid, I have always had a strange fascination with space. Not space travel, or planets, really. More with the weird stuff that might go on out there.

After I was finally convinced to watch (and then converted to the cult of) Battlestar Galactica, the single most chilling moment for me is still when someone is shot out of their craft and freezes while free-floating in outer space. I think I may have had a recurring nightmare of a similar event in the past.

Sunshine, a flawed but deeply thought-provoking (and incredibly scary) sci-fi film that Danny Boyle made a couple years ago, has a similar theme of being abandoned in deep space, without plans or ability to return home. I only saw the film once, not long after it released to DVD, and I still find myself thinking of it, chilled by it. (Despite its flaws, I highly recommend it.)

Anyhow, the point of all this: We started watching X-Files earlier this year, when it came to Netflix (all nine seasons, streaming!), and I have been holding my breath all through the first season, knowing that this is going to bust wide open. I don’t really watch the hour-long drama genre – certainly not the vaguely cop/crime kind – but I got into this really fast. It’s been standalone episodes, but we just finished the first season and I’m delighted that an arc is emerging.

I do recognize that I’m the last person on earth (ahahaha) to actually watch the show, but that said, I insisted we dive directly into season 2. My hopes for this season include the Mulder/Scully romance that is obviously going to emerge, some kind of actual face-to-face alien contact, and, most obviously, a much better wardrobe for Scully.

If you’re inclined to comment, please resist the know-it-all urge and don’t ruin anything for me.

Two announcements:

• My dear friend Jenni (who I have known from a distance for several years and am delighted to be rooming with at The Glen in a week or so) has been working very hard on the Art House America site – and it’s finished, as of last night. So go read, gawk at the loveliness, and enjoy.
• I’m delighted to be the faculty advisor for the newest women’s house at King’s, named for Corrie ten Boom. (You can read the announcement here from last spring.) I know several of the girls from my class last year, and I am very excited to be joining them as they embark on their first year, and to be able to engage in student life at King’s in my first year.

Things I am pondering:

• The perennial question: M.F.A. or Ph.D., or both, and in which order? Do I need to study craft or history? Where, how, when? Do I need prerequisites? And how can I avoid paying for it? These things roll around in my head a lot, and they’ve come back lately in a kind of aggravated existential crisis. (What do you think?)
• I asked this question of a number of teacher/writer friends in an email, but I’ll ask here, too: if you do both, how do you manage both? Do you schedule time for writing into your office time? Or is it haphazard?
• Similarly, blogging friends: do you find that blogging takes away from or enhances your writing time? I used to say that blogging was exercising the writing muscle. Then I stopped blogging. And I think maybe I was right, but it’s hard to start again.
• Jim Belcher’s book Deep Church, which, besides being incredibly engaging, compassionate, and reasoned, is also challenging, expanding, and clarifying my thinking in ways that few books have done of late (Jamie Smith‘s Desiring the Kingdom being one of those few). If you care about church and have been scurrying around the periphery of both relatively traditional evangelicalism and vaguely emergent churches for a while, like me, you can’t afford to skip this one. I promise: you haven’t read it before. And you’ll also enjoy it.
• Speaking of Desiring the Kingdom, I’m struggling with how to develop thick practices in my students through teaching. I’m already committed to not setting deadlines for big assignments for Sunday night or Monday morning, because I know students, and many will not make Sunday into a day of rest if they know a project is due. I don’t want to teach them that behavior – it will burn them out. I’ve been there. I know. And I also plan to focus on Sabbath the week we also focus on poetry and description in my first-semester writing class this fall. But what else? I’m thinking about, for instance, Andi’s article on shelter and my own new (even if shared) office.

You know, just an average Friday morning.

Sometimes life seems settled, and I know roughly what to do next and have a manageable list of things to accomplish. Other times it is crazy. Inevitably the craziness hits when I want to be reading books and spending time outdoors and planning for the months ahead. But today I agreed to a position of some influence on the lives of some students, which I am terribly excited to announce soon, and that makes me realize anew how blessed I am in the work I do, or rather the work I fell into quite unexpectedly.

My friend Allison’s piece on growing into a teaching vocation reminded me today that teaching comes naturally to no one, that it’s something we learn. Some get to learn it from great classroom teachers. I didn’t have many of those before I began teaching (a couple great professors in college and one in grad school excepted), but her observation is heartening:

Often we see vocation as something to claim, not something to grow into. We do this, I think, because vocation identifies us, not only to the world, but to ourselves; carrying a label wards off fear, insecurity and mystery. And we label ourselves as “masters,” our insecurities hidden, the future predictable and bright.

A true leap of faith.

———–

One small note: this Sunday, our dear, dear friend Angela is getting married to the very best of Peters at the New York Botanical Garden, something we’ve been very much looking forward to since we, well, met Peter on New Year’s Day this year. Tom will also be taking a few photos, not as the primary photographer but filling in a few gaps, and I’ll be playing the piano for two congregational hymns. (And we’re very much looking forward to dim sum the day before.)