Time travel, a timeless city, a river and an apostle. Envoloping all of this were two complimentary (and massive) historical works, one about the global history of capitalism, the other about applying a European lens to that global history

I had timed finishing my reading of famed Survivor (play, voice and anaylst) legend’s first book Escape (Stephen Fishbach) to coincide with the final episode of season 50, which provided an added layer to that overall experience.

Turns out the guy can definitely write. I was a bit mixed on the book’s second half, where the nuanced approach of the first few hundred pages had struck a nice balance between this feeling that Fishbach is at once pulling back the curtain on reality tv, and at the same time upholding this equal awareness that the reality is being amped up to 11 on a parady type level, sensationalism fully intact. The fact that we never quite know where those lines truly cross is what makes it addictive. If the second half seems to go all in on the parody, and in my opinion loses some of the character appeal in the process, it’s never less than an entertaining ride. At it’s strongest it’s a unique exploration into the disorienting space of pop culture and it’s consumption through the lens of the reality tv genre.

I only finished one other fiction book this month, the second being Santa Montefiore’s The Secrets of the Starlit Sea. A book I almost set down after realizing I had started a sequel without reading the first. I hung on though thanks to the opening 20 or so pages (and also because it checked an easy box for me- the other thing I failed to realize is that it’s a time travel story). Bonus points for bringing in the supernatural/spiritual undertones. Yet more bonus points for an unexpected setting (I really should have done my research first it appears, or just payed more attention to the title). That historical setting, which I won’t spoil, proved the perfect pairing with a book that was next up on my list (which I am reading this month).

It should be said, in terms of a sequel, while I am sure (or rather, I know) I was missing some context and set up, by the time I was 50 pages in none of that really mattered. I knew the characters, and the gaps in the story were essentially non-existent. While there’s nothing overly deep here, the themes about reconciling with the past are present enough to give it some staying power.

Eddy Harris’ Mississippi Solo: A River Quest had been sitting on my shelf for a bit now. With the warmer weather finally settling in, it seemed like a good time to get back into one of my passions- rivers, and particularly the Mississippi. This one is an autobiography, featuring an unsettled soul making the (percieved) questionable decision to set a canoe on the river and make it to New Orleans. There are larger concerns driving the story, Harris being a black man navigating the waters of a percarious portion of America, but the approach here is less structured and more organic. Befitting the story of a man who knows nothing about canoeing or the river. As he encounters the towns and the people and the obstacles along the way, so do we, and we get these snippets of wisdom breaking through from moment to moment within the escapades. The book is dated, but it’s a reminder of both the river’s complicated history and it’s magic. Mostly I found it to be a captivating entry point into one man’s perspective on such a journey, becoming as it does a window into the larger world.

I happend across The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt as I was in the middle of Mississippi Solo, and while I was reading that on paperback, I was listening to this one on audio. I have a shelf full of book’s on the Mississippi, so keep that in mind, but while I think this book would be a perfectly fine introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the river, I found for me it failed to see past the static details of what the river is, and into it’s actual character and ethos. It’s an information dump, with a lot of emphasis on the ecological realities embedded in the river’s past and pushing back on it’s future, but I found it lacked the necessary poetry needed to give it life.

On the flipside, I have been busy planning a summer trip to England, a “if I could only travel to one more place, what would it be” sort of trip marking my upcoming 50th birthday, largely centered on both a literary interest reaching back to my childhood formation, and connection to my family hertiage. Part of that process for me is of course books, beginning with the book London: A Guide for Curious Wanderers by Jack Chesher. It’s designed as a travelogue for the curious wanderer, with a focus on the sacred art (and space) of walking. It teaches the reader how to “read” the language of what it sees as one of the most unique landscapes in the world. A modern space where layers and layers of active globe shaping history and identity are hiding in plain site. An unplanned city in it’s nature that somehow finds order in the chaos. A city built to wander and to get lost in. The book is organized by theme (Stepping Through Time, Language, Culture), and designed as a collection of self guided walks. And the illustrations are wonderful. A book I will definitely be bringing with me.

The other one I finished this month was The History of London: A City Through Time by Bhaskar Bora. This is a very quick, bitesize overview of London’s history, and one that is unapologetically biased (read: not nuanced) towards its unabashed love of the city. Which there is absolutey space for (get me talking about my hometown of Winnipeg and I’d likely be handing you something similar). If I am visiting a city, I want to hear from those who genuinely believe in and defend it’s city. The ones who are ready to tell you why it’s the greatest place to be, and who will gush about it’s rivers and canals and gardens and quirks and bookstores and art and iconic sites until the editors step in and tell them to limit it a couple decent sized print pages per subject.

Speaking of passion and love for a subject, the element of my family history that runs through England is very much wrapped up in John Wesley, who’s home and grave and museum will be my starting point. For something (Wesley’s methodism) that played such a central role in what would become the stream of my family’s Pentecostalism traversing the pond to our side of the ocean, I know very little about it. Thankfully I am a bit more familiar with Wesley’s history and theology. Thus the reason I picked up (in audio form) Kevin Watson’s new foray into the history of Methodism, titled Perfect Love: Recovering Entire Sanctification- The Lost Power of the Methodist Movement. A great read (or listen) for anyone interested in those Methodist roots and development. An inspired read for making a case for it’s central doctrine- whole sanctification. Every movement exists in conversation with and in relationship to another, and those relationships awaken a larger conversation, be it western, eastern expressions of Christianity, early church development, and even the second temple period from which so much of the larger Christian Tradition finds its most immediate context. That these conversations and relationships are still active and ongoing today is a reminder of why they remain relevant, even if we are far removed from the context that first gave these movements their needed life. Perhaps more so, I really appreciated the way this book helped to lay out the flesh and blood practice of this thing I will soon be encountering at it’s source. It’s a way to imagine my family tree making it’s way through this (now to me) foreign soil as itinerant preachers of their own time.

Continuing in that vein, although not related to England, I continued on my journey through checking off the works of Susan Eastman, a blindspot for me, finishing Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians. On the other side of that equation was the prefect compliment in The Beginning of Paul’s Gospel: Theological Explorations in Romans1-4 by Nijay Gupta and John Goodrich. Galatians is known as one of Paul’s earliest writings, and notably the one where we can most clearly see him working and fleshing out his theolgoical frameowk in real time. The material is raw, honest, muddied and revealing, and there is a reason why Eastman uses it to access what she distinguishes as Paul’s mother tongue, which is simply the shared language, broadly defined, of a given community forged from life and partcipation in community. This contrasts with the father tongue which is the language of a given populist reality as it intersects with the governing Power shaping a society. Where these two things meet in conversation, the mother and father tongues that make up this society, is called the native tongue. For Eastman, recovering Paul’s mother tongue is the necessary way into the force and motivation of his theology, a theology she names as a theology of participation (one that is informed by Paul’s apocalyptic context), a theology that is born in the soil of his own “fleshing things out” in relationship to the Powers.

Romans on the other hand, is known as one of Paul’s final letters, the one where his fully formed theology is layed out in ordered, narrative fashion. In contrast to Galatians, Romans is a grandly structured tome bringing all of the pieces together into a grand vision. No suprise then that it has become a pouplar spot from which to interpret Paul and formulate theologies, most commonly a theology of atonement or salvation. In Gupta’s book, which is a series of essays from a large collection of voices embedded in the current field of Pauline scholarship, the focus is specifically on the letter’s most popular section: Chapters 1-4. Here so much turns on our interpretation of a few select verses, and this book helps to bring us staright into the heart of the larger debate that exists regarding these select vereses. The different voices reflect different positions, but much of it exists as an example of how the dialogue itself works within scholarship, at points building off one another, critiquing portions of one another’s theories and work, and bringing different emphasis and focuses to the foreground depending on what one is seeing from their own vantage point and specialization. I found it to be informative and refreshing, aligning more with some than others, but having plenty of it challenge me along the way. In a broader sense, beginning in Galatians, and then seeing what Paul’s body of work becomes in Romans, was an equally interesting and revealing part of this ecercise for me personally.

I alluded to these two book’s earllier: Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckhert, and Europe: A New History by Roderick Beaton. I’ve been working through Beckhert’s book for a while now, which lands at around 1100 pages. Finally finished it alongside reading through Beaton’s book (listened on audio) over the course of May. Both books find their overlap in the ways they look outwards towards anaylizing a global narrative. Beckhert’s challenging treaties takes aim at capitalisims noted adaptibiliy, something that allows it to ebb and flow through different contexts precisely by taking different shapes stemming from a myriad of different concerns and questions. On that front it’s not accurate to reduce it to a singular conception. And yet, this ability does tend to mask the fact that capitalism is also distinguishable as a singular idea. The thing that sustains it is progress. And not just progress, but a kind of progress.

Beaton’s book comes into the conversation by applying a specific European lens to the same question regarding the formation of a global society. It is equally provocative, although perhaps a bit more precise and narrowed in it’s starting assumptions (as opposed to the broader objective of Beckhert.) I loved both, and I found them pushing me to consider the ways societies are formed, not in a bubble but in a constant clash of powers and peoples and cultures and movements. That we find universal concerns withinn this is a witness to the fact that our way into history is through those transcendent truths that give rise to our critiques. For me, as someone born and raised and living in  a particular section of the west (and as an inheritor of that historical context), it also is a way of reminding me that all such histories belong to a bigger reality.

A Call to Persevere

¹⁹ Therefore, my brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, ²⁰ by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), ²¹ and since we have a great priest over the house of God, ²² let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. ²³ Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. ²⁴ And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, ²⁵ not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Hebrews 10:19-25

Over the past number of weeks my church has been in a series called “one another.” The premise is simple: the phrase “one another” runs through the entire body of the scriptures, being one of the most oft repeated phrases in the canon. So much so that it feels necessary to say, this emphasis on how we relate to one another and how the Gospel is transforming the one anothers running throughout the pages of the scriptures (and forming the world behind the text) indicates the aim the Gospel. Just as, which I uncovered in my recent studies of James’ letter, the culmination of this letter is found in the phrase “pray for one another,” the overarching aim of the Judeo-Christian Tradition is that two-fold phrasing: in Christ we are a transformed body, therefore live as a transformed people. The way to do so is the “one another” of our participation in the Gospel of Christ.

What holds it all together of course is Love itself. This interconnected phrasing to love God, and love one another, which are so tightly intertwined that we cannot pull them apart without losing the whole. The qualities of this Love, which is a qualitative source, not an action, a gift not an accomplishment, are what reveal the nature of God, humanity and creation. In other words: the Gospel is revealed through particpation in the reality the Gospel brings about.

This morning brought us to the simple call to “encourage one another.” And yet, as our pastor pointed out, we don’t have to look far to see that a simple idea has deep roots. Starting with the opening argument: the underlying reason to take this seriously is, as the letter states, “since we have confidence.” Confidence in what? in the Gospel. Or more precisely, the accomplishment the Gospel proclaims. Meaning, the audience of Hebrews is assumed to have good reason for this confidence. This is assumed in the backdrop of the letter’s context.

There is a second assumption at play here as well, and that is the idea that the audience of the letter to the Hebrews was needing change in their given circumstance, and this change is what the Gospel affords. Without needing to dive into what that circumstance is (rooted as it is in the world of second temple Judaism), what can be said is, since they have good reason to believe the Gospel, the invitation that follows is in fact the life of participation. The “change” has removed a barrier to this end. It has made a new way, a fresh path.

As my pastor parsed out, what drives the structure of this passage is the “let us” statements that follow this invitation to participate in this new reality brough about by Jesus.

Let us approach

Let us hold fast

Let us consider

It can be said that the point is found in the final “let us” invitation: let us consider “how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” My pastor fleshed out this word provoke, which despite having a narrowed definition in modern language nevertheless retains this dual nature in being both positive and negative, sometimes one or the other and often both at the same time. Which is precisely the point of the call to “consider” how we engage in such provocation. How we engage this in relationship to “one another” can lead in different directions, one which is destructive, the other which transforms.

But, it’s also important not to miss this: the provocation is nevertheless seen to be a necessary thing. Here my pastor pointed out another word association in the Greek which can be helpful, a word that can also translate the phrase “consider how to provoke” as “beholding.” Which is to suggest, the sort of provocation this has in mind is an act of seeing, an act of knowing. This is what brings about love. Which gives a whole new force to why it matters to the author of Hebrews that provocation only happens when we “meet together.” This is where the call to encouragment takes it’s shape and is given it’s potential.

But of course, the pattern is equally necessary to uphold. Without approaching we cannot come to see the other, and without holding fast we do not have confidence in our reasons to approach. In the context of Hebrews, it imagines a space where all that is seen is the hopelessnes of a world that has not been transformed. That this hope flows from the transformation of one figure in the middle of history is the thing that invites them to see the world through a different lens. one in which we are handed a resurrected imagination, one that can reenchant the world and fill it with a renewed wonder. A wonder that produces hope. This then becomes the interconnected force of this argument. If we are not participating in transformed communities, the one another of it all, we lose sight of the Gospel. At the same time, it is the Gospel that moves us into the one another of it all. This is, indeed, how community works and why they matter.

I am reminded here of a citation from Brian Zahnd’s newest book, Unseen Existences, where he speaks of the wonder of this resurrected imagination in the following way:

“To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace- the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.”

• George MacDonald

“We have the fact, let us seek the mystery.”

• Saint Augustine

“In the pilgrimage of the soul toward the homeland where we’ve never been, wonder is one of our most reliable way markers.”

• Brian Zahnd, Unseen Existences

I was going through some of the unpublished drafts that I’ve saved over the years in my blogspace. Most of these are unfinished pieces, notes that I took on books or articles, thoughts I jotted down but never fleshed out.

I came across a couple I composed close together that were ruminating on the concept of time. Although I am not someone with a great brain capacity for the technical language of science and math, the element of science that I do connect with is the narrative form and abstract theory that can be pulled from the technical language. On this front I have long loved the subject of time (and the more fantastical language of time travel).

In any case, I came across two old drafts from years ago, one dialoguing with an article (and the study it was exploring), another with a book. Relating to the study I jotted down the following quote:

“The universe’s tendency to become more chaotic with the passage of time is part of what solidifies the forward-facing direction of the arrow of time – the more chaotic, the more challenging reversal becomes.” (Scientists Get One Step Closer to Unraveling the Mysteries of Time by Chris Melone)

My notes on the book (which unfortunately I didn’t record the name, so it could be from any number of possible contenders I was reading at the time), follow a similar thread. Time, the author states, “is not a built in feature of spacetime.” Rather, time is a matter of perception, a mental construction. To measure time is not in fact measuring a thing that exists in the way these constructions percieve it, but to measure the relationship between different things in space (whether space is also a mental construction in the same way is another subject according to my notes).

What’s interesting to note about this observation is that, looking back at this draft I can see some of my initial observations about participationist philosophy/theology taking shape alongside this idea of “all things in relationship.” This is how we come to knowledge of anything in this world in regards to that perception of reality.

There is another dynamic at play here though that I noted as being hugely important to how we navigate that truism, and that’s the shape of this percieved arrow of time from order to disorder. What this suggests is that, to come to knowledge of reality through participation (all things in relationship) is to be confronted with the reality that our perception of time is contingent on a “kind” of reality. A reality that is shaped by this conception of finiteness. In conceptual language we speak of this as a movement from life to death, or in the broader terms of entropy, from order to disorder. We percieve this pattern to be the shape of reality precisely because the predictions and patterns that we find in relationship to this world hand us this movement from order to disorder. But here’s the thing I note from this particular study and book: The simple fact that time is a construct, a mental perception that formulates out of a world defined through relationship, tells us that this “kind” of reality isn’t the whole picture. When we look at human function, it would appear that this notion is intuitive. Finiteness, or disorder, is something that life appears to act against. If one wants to give it it’s equally material and spiritual name- Death- we can observe that Death is in fact a state that enslaves our perception of reality to one kind of reality. This is not confined to our neat and tidy appeals to something as reductionist as non-existence. Death is the force of disorder and chaos that pushes back against a different state which we would call Life. This is how we distinguish between what Life acts against and what it desires to bring about, and what Death acts against and what it desires to bring about.

Materialism, by far the leading worldview of the modern world, to me has a real problem when it comes to making sense of Life in this broader use of the word, precisely because it’s held captive to a singular perception of the shape this world takes. As I cited from the book (again, apologies for not being able to name it properly), to even allow ourselves to speak of time in a coherent sense (meaning, using a constructed term to get to a concrete shape of reality), we have to acknowledge what is actually going on within this reality. “What we have is a surface of constant time that spreads throughout the universe, in which every point is the same relative to its vantage point.”

And this isn’t contained to the concept of “time.” For example, the book describes how free fall is the natural state of motion while our constructed conception of gravity is the experience of the push of the object (for us the earth) in an accelerated reference frame.

Most importantly is this simple statement: Entropy hinges on the irreversable. It hinges on the disorder, the chaos. If this is true, it is equally true to say that Life intuitively knows that this is not some natural state given superiority because it appeals to our want and desire for certainty and control (which is what materialist worldviews are expressions of). Life knows and desires order. Life understands that the language of finiteness is simply a construct we create to make sense of the qualities of this thing called Death.

Here I could bring in a book I happen to reading right now called Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation by Christopher Kemp, a book that discusses the ways in which we “find our way” in this world, this reality. Here we find a tension that a  key aspect this formulation of our preception, the function of memory, creates. The localization of this neuroscience within something we might call our experience of this world has to be reconciled with the idea that the same matter from which this emerges is found to be present in space as well. Meaning, and this is one of the key observations thus far from this book, the process of memory cannot be and is not, scientifically speaking, contained to some material object called the brain. Our navigation of this world, quite literally, comes from our relationship to it. That functional process, which we can observe, exists both within the brain and outside of it.

The real question then comes down to this. If it is true, as the study suggests, that our construction of this idea of time is a product of this percieved (and experienced) distance that entropy (increased disorder) creates between ordered Life, from where do we get the language to understand and name the other “kind” of reality that this reveals at the same time. And this isn’t just abstract, theoretical thought. Any time we respond to violence, to oppression, to suffering, we are in fact living this out. One potential answer to this question comes from Brian Zahnd’s recent book Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things. Here he argues that we have indeed been trained to see this world for something that it is not through materialism and the reductionism it craves. Thus, what is inituiive to Life has been relegated to the realm of the unseen, and in materialist terms unproveable, unscientific, un-real. Even as Life continues to act otherwise. Here Zahnd gives Life the name Heaven:

The modern soul is disenchanted because we have sealed off the soul from heaven. We have built a materialist ceiling over our heads and said, “There is nothing beyond the ceiling- all of reality exists beneath the ceiling.” (page 14)

As Zahnd goes on to suggest, noting the logical implications of materialism (whether we recognize it or not): “If we are to avoid ending up as hollow men and women whimpering about the emptiness of it all, we need to find the paths of unseen existences.” In truth, we do so intuitively. The question is, do we do so rationally. It seems telling to me, at the very least, that even where science is telling us otherwise, our predication towards materialist assumptions looms large. Which seems to suggest that even the scientific enterprise is something we feel we need to control in the face of a disordered world. Materialism remains the best way to do that.

In Zahnd’s book, he invites his readers, which his audience would arguably be those whom are open to the language of Heaven, defined as a different “kind” of reality than our perception/cconception of time, to consider the necessary reenchanting process in a materialist age as a pilgrimage. Analagous to (or with) a movement from one reality to another, but more accurately towards an unveilving of the true shape of this relaity which we occupy in relationship.

A pilgrimage, it could be said, towards a critical deconsruction of our constructs as authoratative voices, and the embracing of a process of giving up our need to control. To confront the irony of the fact that what modern materialism teaches and encourages is a control that desires to preserve and protect Death. No amount of appeals to “progress” can escape or explain the logical implications of materialism to this end. The disorder. That’s our modern obsession. And as Zahnd points out, even within the framework of theological confessions that do have a built in language for this idea of Heaven, materialism looms large. It is the same old Epicureanism played out again and again in context. Life is a far more dangerous and uncertain and precarious thing to embrace, precisely because it is not something we can control.

In one of those surreal moments that anchors a specific memory in a time and place you don’t forget, it was on a road trip from Winnipeg to California when news broke of Micheal Jackson’s death. Even more specific, a mere hour after we had been traversing a mostly empty Hollywood Boulevard (back before it made its turn into inevitable decline). What was empty suddenly filled with a seemingly endless stream of people, all looking to snag a picture at his star.

It struck me in that moment how our relationship to these iconic, usually from our childhood, figures can become such an enigma. On one hand a necessary part of our lives. We are in many ways bound to the ways in which their creations become the soundtrack to our lives. And, at least back before the social media age, these figures have a way of becoming larger than life precisely because they appear to occupy this space we never could ourselves.

And yet to grow up with these figures is also to encounter them in our adult lives, where the seemingly unreachable inevitably come falling back down to earth. And one of the most pertinant questions that usually follows this cognitive disonnance is, what do we then do with our memories? Do these memories stand as witness to the ways we were formed in the soil of such delusional constructs, or do they reveal something more fundamentally true, and thus worth preserving, than our weathered eyes might be able to conjure from this kind of “pull back the curtain” form of cynicism.

I was reflecting on this thought as I watching the recent biopic Michael. A film which i saw heading into it’s fourth week with a packed crowd (quite literally, I bought the last available seat, and subsequently rained on the parade of the guy using it to hold his stack of boxed left overs). I was very aware at this stage in the game of the much publicized criticism of the biopic’s decision to steer clear of the controversy surrounding his complicated history. This was, I was told, going to be our childhood memory, not our adult cynicism, and in truth that is exactly what this film is. It taps into the reason these iconic figures mean anything to us at all, which is precisely why this film is hitting on such a different level with actual flesh and blood audiences.

It will of course be the critics whom will say that such an exercise in fealty to the power of memory is somehow a negative thing. That tapping into that innocence and that wonder is somehow reflective of an anti-intellectual pursuit. That such a film is, by it’s nature, a lesser thing for treating this as an important and necessary part of our lives, of how it is we know and experience truth in this world. To me, the fundamental thing these critics miss in this conversation is the simple fact that most people watching this film are fully aware of the adult figure that co-exists alongside our memory. We haven’t punted that to the side. We aren’t failing to see the nuance. We aren’t giving into shallow reconstructions. We are simply understanding that life cannot be reduced to that one thing. What we find in Michael is an important and vital part of what it means to be human, and to pretend as though that’s anti-intellectual is in fact to cater to a delusion.

I would push this further. Beyond the crafts of the film, which I think are worth analyzing and talking about and even celebrating (and yes, I watch a lot of film across a wide spectrum- why i feel I have to qualify that is simply pointing to the larger problem), is the story itself. This hits at another aspect of modern film criticism that bugs me. There is a sense in which the only true form of intellectualism is one which is tied to a certain conception of justice. We find this rampant through much of the present state of academia, but perhaps no more so than in the arts. We live in a world that not only loves its scapegoats, but it needs them. To see past the moral constructs that allow us to preserve our hierahcies is to somehow lose our hold on certainty. When it comes to Michael, for these same voices the fact that two things can be true at once, that a person can have a problematic childhood that feeds into later struggles and similtaneously have that struggle open up a desire for something more, is simply not something willing to be entertained. A Michael who had his innocence stole from him at such a young age. A Michael who had an abusive and controlling father. A Michael who sought refuge in childhood stories and animals in a world where adults and people just seemed to be so much harder to relate to. A Michael whom genuinely responded to the suffering he was encountering around him, and who paved a way through a world dominated by the system (ultimatley against that system). A Michael who’s own craft produced songs which spoke to the angst of an entire generation in the same way.

This is the true foundation for which to frame and understand those adult struggles. As it is said at one point in the film, wanting to grow up into adulthood and being prepared to grow up into adulthood are two different things. This is something the film genuinely leaves on the table for us to consider, even as we celebrate what he meant to our childhoods. The complicated mess of his adult life that follows is just that- another part of what it means to be human. Lest we forget that our childhoods are more than just an elongated march towards a knowledge that it was all a lie, Michael is a reminder that perhaps what our adult lives need more than anything is that childhood wonder. The freedom to sing again when life threatens to steal the songs that once formed us.

Some thoughts on Roderick Beaton’s Europe: A New History:

Listened to this one on audio, which worked fairly well. It’s not the kind of book that demands a ton of underlining, rather it’s interested in drawing out a historical narrative. One that begins with the Greek city-states (or more accurately with the seed bed that gives rise to them) and ends with the modern geo-political realities of 2026.

What’s the essential aim of the book? What makes it new? I was trying to put finger on the pulse of that question, and I think I would simply say the folloiwng: the author (historian Roderick Beaton) wants to take a fresh look at our present geo-political reality by seeing it through the lens of the development of this idea called Europe.

This of course reaches into the global space (as all lenses do, giving us a way to interpret the world), but the difference is, the thing that makes the authors point of view a fresh outlook on an old idea, how we understand the global space depends on our understanding of the European idea. We cannot get to present without it. Here the author puts forth the premise that the historical narrative has been shaped largely by two distinct and co-relating truisms: the existence of this notion of the super-nation on one hand, and the existence of warring super-powers. Who or what controls the other is the pertinent question when it comes to parsing out the nature of the world’s conflicts.

To this end I found the author’s premise compelling and persuasive. i was most interested in the ealier portions, which lays the foundation for the conversation in the ancient world, and the latter portions, which speak directly to the world that I know today and to our present conflicts. Middle portions, specifically the ones dealing with the world wars, weren’t insignificant (far from it and perhaps the most significant moments in this discussion), they were simply overly familiar territory. The second world war is one of the most studied, written about, disected, documented historical periods in the modern era after all.

As I like to at least attempt to do, boiling this all down to a reduced summary of what is a broader picture remains tough. The most important ideas pertain again to the question of these two governing forces, the super-nation versus the super-power. Much of this discussion, which interestly enough feels to be incessently conjuring up the ghosts of the Roman Empire, traverses the relationship between America and Russia. It was fascinating to put on the fresh lens the author is providing and see in that historical narrative the ways in which the idea of Europe, for as tumoltuous as it has been in the divisions that plague it, has forever existed within the push and pull of these two nations. Even more fascinating to consider how the idea of Europe has played into the rise of these two super-powers.

As the author maps out, the tension lies in this similtaneous tendency to ignore the face of these super-powers and the nature and revelance of their presence as (in perception) antithetical forces. What is often missed is the simple fact that both super-powers actually need (and want) this idea of the EU, the present day response to the divide that has plagued Europe in the past and a symbol of it’s ideolgoical presence, to persist and remain stable? Why? Because for as long as nations are held in check by the EU, the superpowers retain their grip. The flipside to this: the EU, at least a functioning one, is actually the European nations greatest counter to the superpowers. The thing is, the superpowers know why this need not be feared: the states which make up the nations will forever be held in check by the fears that nationalism creates. And there is no better source for stoking these fears than the nationalism of a given superpower, especially in the aftermath of the Cold War. Thus, one can look back through history and see how nearly every move America has made on the global front has been in the express interest of both ensuring the EU remains stable while also ensuring that they stoke those fears (for example, their role and interests in stabilizing a divided Germany against their once disinterest in the EU).

It’s worth stating here that, one of the distinctives of the idea of Europe is that it is an idea built on a different kind of power than that of America and Russia. It is a power of collective influence and investment in policy rather than military. Hence why the superpowers have such a massive grip over it’s functionality. When the threat is always (in modern terms) nuclear, you are always a slave. Meanwhile, America and Russia retain it’s power through might, something that in a global age has turned into an equal investment in geo-politics (it’s always about occupation and control of space and borders in a geo-political reality). It’s often assume that “America” is the great modern idea (or ideal), the grand experiment leading the world into the new era. What is apparent, and this is true for any superpower appealing to an ideal in such a way, is that this is in fact a shadow of a pre-existing imagination called Europe parlayed into a functional Empire (superpower). The one thing that convices people this is something other is how people think of military power as the necessary tool of the ideal. This is the great lie of the modern age, and it’s built on the back of Rome.

There is an element here of buying into this particular lens which requires a reader to endorse some semblance of respect for the idea of Europe to begin with. It’s easy to see the conflict and to anylyze the challenges, but if you don’t think it’s a proper aim one might be a bit retiscent to give it the degree of global and historical importance the author does. This is going to be hardest for those who exist within the language and culture of the superpowers. That alone is worth asking why that retiscence exists and where it arises within the historical narrative. It’s also worth asking why the idea of Europe matters as well to the world as a whole. I think posing both of those questions providesd a challenging but rewarding inroad into breaking out of some of our preconceptions, even those that exist within Europe itself.

I loved this move (The Sheep Detectives) 

If you get a chance, go and see it and support it.

My thoughts: 
I expected to like this film. I did not expect to love it as much as I did. From the film’s opening montage, which invests us directly in this relationship between this middle aged man and his sheep, the film establishes a level of emotional intelligence and authenticity rarely seen in such films (such films meaning, live action fare with talking animals) 

That really is the film’s greatest surprise and strength, and if the rows of people sobbing in their chairs behind us was any indication, it absolutely succeeds in achieving what it sets out to do, which is to use this unassuming relationship to say something relevant and important about the bigger questions all of us face when it comes to matters of life and death and how it is we exist in this world. 

I’ve been on record expressing my issues with the recent Knives Out film. I mention that film only because in many ways you could overlay this film on top of that one and find certain similarities. The pairing of the struggling believer with the skeptic. The “mystery” acting as vehicle to bring us to the existential crisis. Fleshing out the relationship between the I and the we (and the thou). The religious symbolism. The central emphasis on this metaphorical examination of the shepherd and the sheep. 

There is a key difference here however. Where I found the latest iteration of the Knives Out films failed to justify the grounds for its own exploration of its questions and its journey, and where I found that film deceptively clouded its own atheist conclusions in illusions of a coloured agnostic “skepticism,” this film is clear about what it’s saying and is willing to say when it comes to those same matters of faith and doubt. 

Which is to say, it’s that rare film that is willing to be honest about the implications of different possible conclusions concerning these questions of life and death, and in so doing it manages to do the very thing so many modern ideologies and worldviews and approaches fail to do- it doesn’t romanticize death, it names it. Further, it challenges us to do the same within the framework of the working relationship it is fleshing out, namely in its philosophical analysis of the challenges nature poses to our valourized human constructs. Rather than simply pretend as though secular humanism can afford us a rational ticket and free licence to avoid the logical implications of natures cruelest expressions, it recognizes the limits of many common appeals to dealing with those questions. It also builds on this in a positive direction however, wondering about what these challenges can reveal to us when it comes to moving towards some form of conviction regarding what is true. 

Which is to say, it’s engaged in actually fleshing out the logical argument and giving it power over over our reductionist readings of the world. 

The subject of memory plays a particular role on this front, and to cite one small example of what this film does with its themes, it explores that inevitable cognitive dissonance that emerges from wanting to set our hopes and investments on memory itself- on keeping a memory alive when such “memory” is not only held captive to another, but inevitably as precarious a thing as the others own enslavement to the same powers and forces of death. How we confront and become honest with this reality matters, and it becomes the only way we have into ultimately justifying what we believe and why through the tools of logic. 

And in case it’s not evident, any kids film that is dealing with such subjects in such a way deserves to be praised. For me it hit on so many levels important to my own journey, being one who has long wrestled with our (human) relationship to the whole of life, and as someone who continues to critique a failure in the modern West to take death seriously. Most of all, even if you disagree with the film’s conclusions, it teaches us how understanding and being able to articulate what we believe and why is a worthwhile and necessary endeavour. Such things are found in both the deconstruction and reconstruction, a process that can be afforded to both young and old. To this end, as the film suggests, what is true about this world and our lives matters because it informs the ways we participate in it. It is in fact our lives in the face of the reality of death that become the grounds for the necessary justification. 

Now if only Rian Johnson had watched this film first. 

And one last note- the scene where the sheep is making his best attempt to describe the church is hands down one of the best and funniest sequences I’ve seen in a long time.

*this is a transcript of a recent sermon I gave on prayer

The Prayer of Faith
¹³ Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. ¹⁴ Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵ The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. ¹⁷ Elijah was a human like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. ¹⁸ Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth yielded its harvest. (James 5:13-18)

“This call to interconnected living defined the early church, and it resonates today for us, in the evangelical covenant church, as we seek to embody Christ’s radical love in our relationships with others.” (Evangelical Covenant Church)

PRAY FOR ONE ANOTHER

Here in James we find the call to pray for one another.

If only it were that simple.

And maybe it really is. I don’t know about you, but I would be the first to put up my hand and say, okay, but I actually genuinely believe that I suck at praying.

The evangelical covenant church is currently in a denomination wide invitation to participate in this series titled “One Another.” When I was given the invitation to put together a teaching for our local community on the subject of prayer, I actually had a choice, between a couple different one another topics, prayer being one and the other option seemingly embedded in an obscure teaching on circumcision from Galatians.

And yes, I am bad enough at praying that I debated going with the latter

When I settled on prayer as my teaching subject, I asked my wife (Jen) for advice. Her response- Dave, get out of your head and just be practical. Anyone who knows me knows I’d likely disappoint her here. But she knows me well enough to be on to something here. I am somebody who needs to parse through the what and the why of a given thing. And the what and the why of my struggle with prayer? As an introvert prayer makes me anxious. Praying publically, but it also represents a struggle when it comes to getting stuck in my own head, be it struggling to find words, not doing well with silence, or even wrestling with the implications of what prayer expects.

I could probably spend a good deal of time unpacking that struggle on a surface level, a topic I seem to come back to in an almost cyclical nature as the years go by. But in this case, I suspect the real struggle when it comes to prayer runs deeper, and that it’s worth digging a little to unearth what the real root of that struggle actually is.

The covenant write up seems to suggest the real crisis of prayer is found in it’s vulnerability. To pray in the face of our given reality, the reality of this world, to acknowledge the actual shape of our lives, is to find ourselves risking much, even simply in our perception, in the eyes of God and one another, and even risking feeding our questions and our doubts. I feel like that makes sense. At the root of it, prayer creates a crisis that forces us to reconcile these tensions. And in truth, a lot hangs in the balance, particularly when we stop to actually pay attention to what pray is.

Easier maybe to imagine that as personal struggle and stay in my own head. But it gains a whole different kind of weight when we see prayer through the lens of this mornings passage- the call to pray for one another. Or to pray “together”- the stakes get bigger.

That has been the lingering question I’ve been pondering over this past week- how do I get from the challenges prayer represents for myself to those specific concerns for what prayer means for our lives together. Because it seems to me that, if I actually can’t get out of my own head and into the practice, it’s the one another of it all that suffers. Which is what this series is all about.

Last week was about how love, which emphasized that love is the foundation. Love is what this whole thing is all about. If love (of God, of others) is the point, prayer seems to be a first step in fleshing that out. But here’s the thing: prayer is the source of the tension. That’s easy to see. The much more difficult thing to parse out is, it’s also the grounds by which we address the tension, and even redeem it. That vulnerability opens us up to a conversation about:

• our ideas of who God is, who we see ourselves to be, how we view the world
• the story of God and Christ that is holding all of this together.

And what we find in-between these two ideas is the one another of it all. To pray for one another is to take those initial struggles and bring it into conversation with the story.

Coming back to James chapter 5. Part of the great power of the text in terms of helping us to wrestle with this tension, is the way it can remind us that we are not alone in feeling and dealing with this tension. The first thing that stood out for me to this end, taking from the commentary I read (Peter Davids), is the suggestion that 5:13-18 finds James “returning” to the subject of prayer. Meaning, this subject of prayer doesn’t come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a subject that James has been fleshing out the whole way through. Thus I decided to begin by seeking out where James actually starts with this idea of prayer.

Which brought me all the way back to Chapter 1:

⁵ If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. ⁶ But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. ^7,8 For the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:5-8)

I want to pause on that first line: “If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God…” (1:5)

The word you… “Whenever you face”, consider it joy… “because you know” endurance will be produced through… “your faith”… “so that you may be” mature and complete, lacking in nothing (1:1-4)… indicates the thing being made whole, or complete. But that you is not an I, it is, in this case, a we.

Second, the phrase lacking in nothing (vs 4), is contrasted with the ensuing phrase “must not expect to receive anything (vs 8), with the thing bridging these two realities together being the word “Wisdom.”

The inference here, borrowing from my commentary, is that lacking in nothing becomes synonymous with having wisdom. Or to put it another way, to have wisdom means that we lack in nothing. This, here in James, is what “we” seek in prayer.

What then is wisdom? As someone who does spend a lot of time getting stuck in their own head, it’s easy for me to intellectualize this word, to turn it into a statement of abstract intelligence and controlled theology. However, wisdom in James is better understood as the true knowledge of the character and story of God that comes through weathered, experiential, participatory knowledge. This is what leads to maturity. And it is described in 3:17 as having the following quality- pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, fully of mercy and good fruit, no partiality, no hypocrisy.

If this is true, I wonder, and this is purely my thought. But I wonder if the real point here is not distinguishing between those who lack and those who don’t, but rather resting in the proclamation that “all” lack in the endurance this wisdom produces and proclaims. Precisely because none of us  is whole. We, as it is with the whole of creation, are in process.

Here I think we are getting closer that tension I was talking about earlier. This idea that we are a transformed people, and that we are also in the process of being transformed. That’s a difficult and hard thing to make sense of in my head. And yet, where this leaves a liminal space in-between, forcing us to wrestle with both realities all at once, the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense of the lived life. We know this tension to be true, that much is intuitive to the human experience. We know the world, this life, contains struggle, and where the Christian story breathes truth into this picture what we are handed is a seeded tension.

If this tracks, at least for me this is where it was leading me, the subsequent discussion of that charged word double mindedness starts to make sense:

But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:6-8)

Here we find two co-existing operative words- faith and doubt. To doubt, in this case, is to lose sight of this basic truth of the Christian story. Faith on the other hand, becomes the beating heart of this wisdom that is so central to James’ view. A wisdom that is made manifest in our lives as a an act of God. It comes to know a thing precisely through our act of participation in the story- the vulnerability of prayer is our way into this participation in faith that brings this Wisdom into view.

But, here’s the real revelation that comes breaking in through James’ letter- this is a gift. This is not leaving us to fight against the tension in order to bring about the world, the life, the outcome that we want. Rather it is God’s work in inviting us to participation in this liminal space as He brings about the promised transformation. In 1:4, this endurance, or process of transformation, is something we are asked to “let have it’s full effect.” This Wisdom is that which our generous and loving God gives through prayer.

This is good news, but it also comes with a warning in the larger context in James’ letter concerning this particular community- there is a false wisdom that comes not from God, but a different power. It is described as envy, selfish ambition, boasting, falsehood. This is described as “unspiritual,” which for James’ hearers means an opposing power to the God whom holds the world’s redemptive force in His hands.

So when James goes on to point out right after naming these powers the evidenced fact of “those conflicts and disputes among you…” this is about how prayer brings these two kinds of wisdom- true wisdom and false wisdom- to the forefront of our lives together. That double mindedness that he speaks about  is given a flesh and blood application. It becomes a question in James of which story we are participating in, and what that participation brings about in the one another of it all. Where this opposing power is given reign in our lives there is, as the verse puts it, disorder. Where the Wisdom of God is given reign in our lives there is a reordering of the chaos.

This is, then, what faith calls us towards, is the Wisdom that comes from God, a wisdom that has the power of reordering the shape of our community and our lives.

I love how Amar Peterman puts it in the book Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local:

“Faith is the polyphonic hum of belief and devotion. It begins with the glimmering incantation of our souls, O God, you are my God… My soul clings to you (Ps 63:1, 8) It blooms when our endless hunger and longings meet the divine reality that God is with us here and now. Faith is the gentle vibration of the Spirit that lives in us, providing the baseline of hope. It is our orientation to God and the world. Even if all else is stripped away, the hum remains. Christ with me, Christ, before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me.”

As he puts it, “Belonging must become the hermeneutic starting point” of our lives. Or, our lives together.  

The elephant in the room. Here I’ve been dancing around the part of the passage that most often trips people up- pray for one another, so that you may be healed. What throws things into crisis more than this- we pray for an outcome, we don’t get that outcome, our faith is thrown in crisis. What James is reminding his readers of is that the thing that ultimately gets affected is the one another of it all. There is a two-fold nature to this observation however- it is also the one another of it all that becomes the healing and revealing process.

There is a more important observation though. Notice how the phrase “Will save” is attached to the phrase will raise: “The prayer of faith WILL save the sick, and the Lord WILL raise them up…” (James 5:15)

What often gets neglected here is that there is a past, present, future dynamic at play here. What’s interesting to point out is, when we lose sight of the true story, when we enter into the world and it’s story, often given the label in our modern day, “secularity,” what ultimately happens is this liminal space gets erased. There no longer is a past, present, future dynamic in which the tension is allowed to emerge, there is only the future we are left to fight our way towards. And often against the past.

Augustine once put a similar idea this way regarding the nature of secularity. He looks to bring forward a more ancient definition of the secular, describing it as the space between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. As he famously put it, we can live ordinary lives with redemption behind us and before us. And the thought I had when thinking over this basic redefinition was simply this- what if the tension itself is the gift. That is the point of the Christian life, is recognizing how the story creates it precisely by redeeming it. This is how Wisdom emerges.

So what do we do with this? In our lives? In our church community? In our neighborhoods?

First thing- make sure we are soaking ourselves in the story. Let it get baked into every facet of our lives, both together and apart. Let the hope be spoken into the mix.

Second, expect a prayer shaped life to expose the false wisdom that is robbing us of that hope. And expect that what this brings to light in the midst of that tension is the gift. The gift of Wisdom and the gift of community. The primary shape of our Christian formation is the body of Christ, and as I once heard it put, prayer is the great leveling ground. And in truth, what other story frees us to actually name the tension for what it is? What other story allows us to co-exist in community where one person can speak the word “I am not alright,” while another can speak about the workings of God in their life. Where one can be found in a deep rooted space of doubts while another is being illuminated by a strengthened faith. Where one is bringing their struggles and another their victories, one is bringing a story of healing and another a deep rooted sense of grief and loss.   

Third and lastly, recognize the power of our liturgy. If James 5 is the culmination of this larger argument, prayer begins first with repentance. Note the first part of this morning’s verse- “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” Confession, the turning, is the forming ground for entering into true participation with the body through prayer.

A last thought, once again from Peterman in Becoming Neighbors. He recognizes the challenge of the tension, that it can find us coming up against a wall that seems insurmountable. And yet, faith beckons us to ask a different question- “What will we be to each other if the world doesn’t end.”

It’s a question that breaks into the what and the why of the struggle prayer represents. This quote isn’t about some unnamed future, it’s actually about pushing us all the way back into the present with a resurrected imagination. After all, at the heart of this all is the similar question, “how then will we live.” That’s the invitation of prayer.

Looking back at my reading over the month of April, three things have become clear

1. I have apparently adopted a new experimental approach- having multiple books on my currently reading list but reading small portions of each at a time in a given sitting. A chapter or two of four different books instead of my usual 50 pages of  one fiction/50 pages of one non-fiction a day (when I look at my average). This wasn’t intentional. In fact, I think I know where the idea came from- finishing Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read earlier this year. In it she gives each chapter (or essay) to one idea or reflection or approach that opens up the bigger questions concerning why we read. Some of the chapters speak for themselves, others are even designed to sit alongside contradictory notions, with the aim of breaking one out of “must read this way” mindsets and demands. The chapter on reading multiple books at a time is not only positioned alongside chapters that suggest doing the opposite, but speaks to the ways exploring different approaches can open up our awareness of how we encounter stories and their inspiration. Given that this approach is different from the way I usually approach reading, it has been an interesting exercise both to find myself quietly incorporating it in my subconscious (as in, waking up and wondering how I got here) and to explore it’s impact on my reading. life. I can say this- it does tend to distinguish which books have the more powerful draw (as in, which ones I can’t wait to return to) and which ones don’t, even at times distinguishing between when that draw comes (I might not be drawn to a book in the first hundred pages, but then suddenly I find myself looking  to cheat by sneaking in a few more chapters). There is a second conciliary impact that I think is directly associated with this new found practice though which is even more noted, leading to my second observation
2. I find myself more ready and more willing to put a book down. Which I don’t usually do, especially with purchased books. I did this most recently with Ken Follett’s Circle of Days, a most anticipated of mine, Dennis Bock’s Strangers at the Red Door, and Kate Quinn’s The Astral Library. I am presently feeling like it might happen with Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. But if I was to entertain the positive end of this equation, there is a certain liberation with learning how to do this without regret.
3. Thirdly, it would seem my year continues the trend of reading stories that pair well together. For example, I could not have imagined a more timely one-two punch than Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha and Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art and the Path of Unknowing by James K.A. Smith. Beha’s answer to the question of the title utlimately ends on the classic The Cloud of Unknowing, and Smith’s book makes that his starting point. Or my presently reading The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt and Eddy L. Harris’ Mississippi Solo: A Memoir. No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister blends perfectly into my currently reading of Libby Page’s This Book Made Me Think of You. The Library of Lost Maps pairs with a book I finished last month, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why it Matters). The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection, leads to my currently reading Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local by Amar D. Peterman fits well with the similarly themed (on the act and power of communion) Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King. For whatever reason, I find this following my reading year as a visible pattern, often without realizing it until I’m a decent way into the book. It’s something I am really enjoying.

The Books

The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress by James Cheshire, started things off with the real life journey of this accidental stumbling across a treasure trove of old and forgotten maps that tell the story of the unfolding of Western history by way of the map’s particular shaping of a world both with particular fixed context and in flux. As an armchair lover of maps, I always find the ways in which they shape and tell the movement of history fascinating, and the book has the look and feel of a grand old treasure hunt.

Speaking of book pairings, much of this fits well with two choices on my currently reading list- The Discovery of Britian: An Accidental History by Graham Robb, in which his own stumbling into a paradigm shifting encounter (in his case with the landscape) reshapes popularized histories and understandings of Britian, and Europe: A New History, which of course reaches more broadly into the shaping of an idea connected to this particular space.

I had a good time with The Faraway Inn by Sarah Beth Durst. It’s a breezy comfort read indicative of the type of magical realism (or low fantasy) that helps reimagine the world as a place where our struggles can meet whimsy, wonder and delight. It also delves into themes such as family, lostness, and love, following a young woman in flux as she uncovers some of the secrets and dynamics of her family’s past and discovers her place in it’s present. On a different front, and certainly geared much more towards a younger audience, Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs by Don Everts does something similar with the motif of found family.

If those themes might be given a practical lens through which to apply them to our everyday lives, a book like Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices For a Whole and Holy Life by Grace Hamman really opens up the relationship between the expectations and demands of the world and genuine transformation. One of the great insights it afforded me is considering how virtues and vices essentially belong to the same idea, operating and functioning together as a nuanced picture of the way they bring us to growth. What lies behind our sense of virtues is the equal presence of vice, and it is equally true to say that whatever we consider virtuous (or good) also, by it’s nature, causes harm. This is what the old paths can reveal, is a way beyond virtues as moralism and measure and towards the idea of practices embedded in actual transformation of self and world.

Or the even more stridently practical Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local by Amar D. Peterman, a small book with a powerful punch. I left this one saying that I know I will be returning to it, and my best advice would be to buy a copy and bring your highlighter. If you are looking for a book that gives flesh and blood to the idea of community and relationship bound together through our disagreements and, equally so, our convictions, this is essential reading.

Speaking of connection and belonging, The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis proved to be a bit of a mixed bag, but it’s central conceipt- that places are bound together by bridges, and those bridges can tell the stories of the different elements of our connections across place and time, is compelling enough to keep it afloat. The unfocused nature does strand it’s naming of bridges with a particular conception or idea (such as The Bridge of Immortality, or The Bridge of Home, or the Bridge of Commerce), preventing it from becoming fully realized as an idea, but it is a reminder that who we are (and what this world is) is intimately connected to our sense of place. and time.

In it’s own way, having picked up and read 101 Fascinating Canadian Film and TV Facts by Thom Ernst after attending a seminar on the history of Canadian film, it’s a reminder of how essentially every subject can be a window into world history in it’s own way (be it bridges or be it cinema). And in many ways, I am who I am and the place I occupy is what it is because of theses “facts,” which was a fun romp through the emergence of cinema and screen within our borders.

Bridges of course would denote the importance of crossing borders all the same, which is something that I found in Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue by Susan Grove Eastman. I’ve been working on fixing a major blindspot by filling in Eastman’s work, and I’ve been loving it thus far. The father tongue, as Eastman explains, denotes the language of the dominant power within our present context shaping public discourse. It creates a gap between the subject and the self for the sole purpose of finding a cohesive and collective idea that allows us to progress a given society. The mother tongue is the art of conversation, or turning together. It is the private language that binds the intimate forms of our relationships and our communities. These two things form a coexisting marriage that allows us to understand the nature of these connnections between space and time. Not inconsequentially, it is also the only way to truly get at a proper portrait of those things that are lost in time and yet remain profoundly important (in their interpreation) to us in this present moment. One of the powerful things that emerges from this concerning Paul is the way it also helps address one of the biggest point of controvery embedded within Pauline scholarship- the relationship between Paul as Jew and his ministry to the Gentile world. Here both father and mother tongue help shed light on how and why so much of this hotly debated subject requires us to learn how it is that Paul existed with both forms and language at the same time (as we all do).

And hey, if you want a fun way to play this same idea out, New York City Coffee: A Caffeinated History by Erin Meister reflects this same idea in telling the history of New York City through it’s relationship to coffee. Here broader movements and narratives meet with the particular stories of pioneers, coffee shop owners and communities and businesses. Or the cross-cultural movement in Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton, where it documents the real life story of Dalton’s chance encounter with a live Hare, something that opens up a world she never knew existed, and even teachers her about her own sense of personhood and understanding of humanity.

It’s interesting to compare the weightiness of The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery, another blindspot I checked off my list, with the breeziness of The Faraway Inn. Both appeal to a sort of magical realism, a conceipt rooted in the existence of a particular place that opens up a world previously unseen. In The Blue Castle it is a wanted escape from reality. In The Faraway Inn it is an unexpected answer to the existential wrestlings with reality. For Montgomery’s richly sacrastic protagonist (the way she responds with such stark cynicism in the face of a dire and fatal diagnosis- the book’s premise is built around a woman whom finds out she has a year to live- I found to be deliciously irreverant), reality is the pull where the the veil is suddenly lifted on the way the world actually is leading to a life of endless expectations and motions being left to feel startingly and uncomfortably meaningless. There is a transofmation that takes place, to be sure, but in The Faraway Inn we begin with an inate awareness of that cynicism and move towards a different kind of unveiling. Both in their own way can tell a journey towards a similar place, just by way of very different paths.

I’m thinking here too of If Only Love: A Memoir of Second Chances by Shelley Staywell and This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page (again, unexpected pairings). Staywell’s memoir is built around encountering a set of letter’s after a devastating loss that tells a story not just about the loss and the past that now holds it under lock and key, but about her. In No Two Persons, Page is telling a story of a woman encountering an unexpected gift in the form of books in the wake of her own devastting loss that opens up the story not just of the loss and the past, but of her own self. Speaks to the ways in which everything exists in relationship.

Speaking of that skepticism and cynicism that Montgomery so wonderfully brings to life, two of my favorite reads of the year thus far came in April with Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, a book that reminded me of why I remain so enchanted with the Inklings- the art of debate and charged discourse across diffferences as a means of forming relationship has become lost to (and on us) today where it has become synonymous with online discoourse, and it was so wonderful to come across a flesh and blood example of such a thing alive and well today. And Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha. While I have written elsewhere about what this book means to me, in giving voice to my own story and journey, words don’t suffice. This is the sort of book that helped me to understand my own self better, precisely because it understood my journey. It asked my questions. It went through similar struggles. It found similar paths through when it comes to facing cyncism and skepticism head on and seeking a rational way forward. I am extremely grateful to it for this. As a sweeping treatment of the history and development of continental philosophy it’s also excellent. As an argument for a rational approach to belief in God that doesn’t fall into the trappings of modern, western apologetic interests, its as refreshing as it is compelling.

Lastly (but not least), is my token comfort read in Twighlight Falls (Shady Hollow #4) by Juneau Black. I’ll be sad when the series is done. Another murder, more small town drama, more exploits between the city dwelling creatures, and of course more coffee.

It’s also worth throwing The Gospel According to Mark by James R. Edwards into the mix. I’ve been working through that one since December, and finally finished it along with The Gospel of Mark itself. We do have different theological dispositions, but that should not diminish Edward’s scholarly work. Sitting within a conservative, reformed tradition, that certainly does bleed through along the way, but the attention to the history and the scholarship is equally on display, in some really exceptional portions on textual criticism as well. The biggest thing I took away- his idea of the parallel narrative threads in Mark, briging together a way of reading that sees Mark telling the story of Jesus (the passion narrative), the story of his readers (the post resurrection/new creation narrative), and the story of Israel (the cosmic narrative) all at the same time. One can read it as though it is telling the story of Jesus from his emergence to his resurrection, and one can similtaneously read it as though the opening words are telling the story of it’s readers situated within the new creation. The beginning of the Gospel, as it begins, can read equally from both fronts. Holding this together is the story of Israel, which gives it that cosmic focus. The more I have been applying this, the more it has been coming illuminated and alive.

While certainly a primary aim of reading is the act and interest of understanding the other, be it a perspective, person, or story that is different than your own, one of the great joys of reading is also finding those stories and voices that allow you to feel seen and understood. Even better (in my experience anyways) when it arrives completely unexpected.

This was the case with Christopher Beha’s recent book, Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, a book that I am in the middle of re-reading. A book that, upon first glance, might appear to be yet another tired entry into the world of christian apologetics, rife as it is with intentional and targeted polemic. Turns out that’s not what this book is. At all.

This is, in fact, a book I wish I could put in the hands of all of my atheist friends- more than that even; all of my “friends,” as a way of saying here, if you would like to understand my own journey, my own path, read this, the basic thrust of what I am arguing for and against. A book which, in it’s introduction alone, seems to capture my journey nearly beat for beat, so much so that it left me certain now that I, with a life time of feeling like I have never truly “belonged” anywhere, exist as a type. That sounds like a negative, but trust me when I say it was a liberating revelation, if indeed I could qualify it as such. And yes, I use the word nearly with intent, as there are subtle nuances that distinguish us, certain questions I follow with more vigour than he does, and small points of departures in terms of where this shared journey lands. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a mirror held up to this extent and this degree. That’s something I am deeply grateful for.

At it’s heart, the book walks through the history of continental (western) philosophical development. Not as an information dump, but as a way of mapping his particular pathway by way of his particular questions, engaging with the studied and analyzed philosophical threads. It seeks to caputre the lay of the land for what it is so that any move into the larger interests of a rational discussion about God and reality and empiricism can be held in check. Whether we recognize it or not, and whether we like it or not, modern atheist-religion debates are birthed from the same soil.

One of the things Beha captures with an especially astute voice and hand is the way these philosophical roots become the thing that ultimately sets him in express conflict with his honed and articulated atheism. It brought me tumbling back to those moments in my own life where, equipped with the thing that had promised to liberate me from religion, and in-particular Christianity, I suddenly found myself face to face with a re-molded and re-casted dogmatism closed off to inquiry. In short- I found myself face to face with angry atheists reacting against the very same thing that had supposedly energized their own weaponized empiricism- that history of philosophical development.

Why the reaction? Because those same philosophical voices, when cited back to the ones that claimed them as their own, challenged their tightly guarded positions. The real problem was, for this particular expression of atheism in this particular point in history, it would seem it became commonplace for the actual tensions and divide apparent within these philosophers, largely between materialism and dualism, to get swept under the rug in favour of expressed positions that refused to attend for either while trying to retain both in service of defeating the basic claims of relgious belief.

It’s in chapter sixteen (The Artist Forming the Work) that Beha really made this come alive for me, where he moves into Kant’s “greatest atheist disciple,” Schopenhauer, set as it is against Hegel’s great reconstruction efforts (of metaphysics).

Like Beha, Schopenhauer found me on my journey through his express interest in not just the what by the “why” of things (which he understood as “the mother of all sciences”). That is, any coherent and rational discussion about reality cannot be content to simply appeal to the commonplace rhetorical device of the “I don’t know,” but must be willing to atend for the nature and shape of knowledge itself. It is the why question that bridges any concern for the empirical with the intuition of the lived life, and it is on this level that Shopenhauer “believes that the nature of sufficient reason has been consistently misunderstood” within an incoherent appeal to how it is that we know anything at all (his exploration of the relationship between object and subject, or the notion of all things in relationship, stemming from the relation between the will and representation).

Now, not to get lost in the nuances of Schopenhauer’s particular philosophical interests and development, there are three central points that overlap with my own story of first encountering that resistance within my newly adopted atheist communities (armed as we were with the Bertland Russell’s and the famed Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris/Dennett four horsemen). The first is this:

• “(In Schopenhauer’s view), if our sense of ourselves as freely acting will is inconsistent with our picture of material reality, we should not assume that the former must yield to the latter.”
• Schopenhauer’s appeal to a world that is, in reason, not ordered nor rational, and more importantly represents “a kind of thoughtless, meaningless pulsing,” and through it’s representation, “an endless parade of suffering.”
• “For Schopenhauer (and critical to much of his thought), there can never really be an ethical “ought,” so one can’t exactly say that it’s “wrong” to take one’s own life, but one can say with certainty that it is no way to escape the problem of the will. For suicide is a preeminent act of the will (in Schopenhauer’s express definition of that term). The appropriate response to the reality of existence is instead a kind of stoic quietism. The will’s “self-elimination,” comes not by suicide but by resignation: “This is the ultimate goal, and indeed the innermost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is salvation from the world.”

It’s the last point in-particular that stands out for me and my own journey, as this is precisely the thought exercise that I landed on when asking those in my atheist communities to attend for their own indebtedness to materialism and the implications our beliefs hold for the ways in which we make sense of the lived life. My own repeated questions, “if there is rational grounds for me to kill myself, is there good reason not to,” and secondly,”If there is no good reason, why do I will not to do so?” were questions that would eventually, in my admittedly loaded term, “ex-communicate” me from these communities. But here is the irony- I got the question from Schopenhauer, one of the central voices forming the very soil out of which these modern atheist expressions would arise, including the inate tendency for modern atheism to fill in the gaps of it’s own incoherent arguments with that catch all term- “art.” Somehow it became acceptable for reasoned arguments to replace God with art while still imagining a stark empiricism rooted in materialism as the highest order. These are the things my own atheism needed to hold to the fire, and what remains baffling to me today is that it is thinkers like Schopenhauer who offer the most coherent and rational means of getting there, it’s simply that “many atheists” find the implications of his reasoning, to borrow Beha’s word, “repugnant” (hence the anger I faced).

It should be said too, this tendency isn’t isolated to Schopenhauer. What I also found way back then is that this modern atheist expression was equally as adept at ignoring the consistent appeal to god apparent within the very philosphers it was founded upon (the ones who shape the western ethos). There is an (again, ironic) express sense in which Schopenharuer actually could be considered the most truly atheistic of the bunch if we use the modern expression of that term. Part of what gets shoved under the rug is the fact that atheism today means something quite different from what it meant in the world of those philosophers. and there is a strange sense in which, in what I would argue is a modern world built on a practice of leaving such terminology largely undefined so as to make it immune from critique, the modern western world has handed us a Christianity that couldn’t be more atheistic in thought and expression and an atheism that could not be more religious. What runs underneath that sentiment for both stated positions is once again the bread and butter of modern western thought- materialism. A materialism that is both necessary to hold the western enterprise together, and yet cannot make coherent sense of the lived life.

Beha suggests that Schopenhauer’s work has a special appeal to “an artistically inclined depressive,” and the western persona holding a particular interest in the buried eastern traditions. Both of which would be true for me. The restless skeptic (or cynic) whom is not content to appeal to the sort of rationalism which is content to finding ways to keep the why questions at a distance. In many ways, what I was after as someone posing those questions above to my shared atheist communities was the sort of atheism that could be held to the fire precisely because it was honest about what it actually holds to be true and states it believes. That’s why I love the philosophers, even where I disagree. It’s not enough to be persuaded away from something, it needs to understand what one is bneing persuaded towards. Modern athiesm (and religion or Christianity- these two things are often hard to tell apart) has become good at trying to pretend as though we can get by on it’s narrowed approach to empiricism, with the less hostile versions bringing in the “I don’t know” rhetoric as a means of forging some level of a broadcasted humility. I have never found this compelling or satisfying. It doesn’t take much poking and prodding to get behind this rhetoric and find an express allegiance to that materialism that isn’t willing to contend for the implications within the lived life of what one actually believes. Much harder to get beyond the resistance towards the inherent questions it poses of itself, and into the sorts of unencumbered debate that allowed these philosophers to coexist within their impassioned disagreements. In many ways, both atheist and religious (and in-particular Christian) alike continue to be addicted to the method of modern apologetics precisely because it provides them empirical certainty about the materialism that is being held on to so tightly and so fervently. Which is why I have tended to see that as the first battle ground for getting beyond it (mostly not to much fruitfulness unfortunately).

And I do think a book like this is a welcome breath of fresh air to this end. No better way to break the modernist bubble than through an honest analysis of it’s “fathers” (and yes, the inevitable patriarchal language applies in and outside of religion to this end). Funny enough, this is the exact basis for my critique of Protestantism (or many of the tenants within it) as well- no better way to get beyond that bubble than by bringing an honest exploration of the “fathers” and their great debates to the table.

Which is also to say, looking at where my journey has brought me to, if I am going to be able to honestly assess the why of where I am and what I believe to be true, I can’t base it on my critique of modern evangelicalism or modern atheism or protestantism. Rather, for me, I need to be able to articulate why I ultimatley find Schopenhaur’s arguments less than persuasive as part of that larger development of thought. An argument for or against, to borrow Beha’s phrasing, skeptical belief, has to be able to converse with what are it’s honest and reasoned alternatives. Anything less is simply avoiding such rational critique.

“This is a book aboute how to be when you don’t know.”

Or, as James K. Smith puts it in his latest book, Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark, a book about “how to live when you don’t know what to believe or who to believe, or how you could possibly know.”

The liberation of what he refers to as “profound uncertainty.”

Here he makes an important distinction- it is not about “not knowing,” rather it is about the process of “unknowing.” A word he borrows from the anonymous fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

What distinguishes the act of unknowing from not knowing? One word- conviction. Or better put, uncertain conviction that the mystery worth knowing does in fact exist and can be known.

This is difficult for those of us (or at least all of us in the western hemisphere) whom live in what Smith calls a “knowledge economy.” Knowledge=value and worth, and such knowledge is defined as the aquisition of certain right information regarding what this world is and how it can be controlled. This is what hands us our identity, is whether we know or not. This is what ultimately matters to the human enterprise.

What we ignore is the simple notion that, in our need to control such a conception of knowledge becomes a defense mechanism against the idea that “mystery” means we are not in control. Thus philosophy, Smith’s profession, has become an endless stream of necessary justifications regarding what we know and what this knowledge enables us to control.

As Smith puts it,

“It might be that our uncertainty is not a problem to be eradicated but a country to inhabit, a place to wait for some other way of being to come over the horizon- not certainty or clarity or comprehension, but an awareness…”

An awarness of (and for) the mystery, someting that Smith imagines being caught up in Meister Eckhart’s well known prayer, “God, rid me of God,” a prayer designed to find a God (Truth) beyond “God” (our certain constructions).

In his introduction, Smith talks about being a young man navigating the two worlds of his present aspirations, that of an itinerant preacher speaking to farming communities in rural Ontario, and working his way through school to become a professional philosopher.

Both things he describes as being fundamentally about a need to “get it right.” Both things feeding eachother in one of the book’s first observations of an exercise in later humilty- that he ever imagined his didactic sermons based on delineating a certain conception of knowledge having “anything to do with their lives.”

“Here was a twenty-two-year-old-kid who’d read a lot of books, standing in front of them trying to parse Trinitarian personhood through mineteenth-century scholasticism as if it mattered.”

A second point of later humility emerges here- recognizing that this approach to knowledge was, at it’s heart about “winning.” Win the argument (even with the argument itself) and you have the Truth. Here Smith imagines this as offering a security that became quietly aware as a prison. A prison that the entire enterprise of western philosophy has created for itself, from Aristotle’s “All men by nature desire to know,” (and Plato’s formative foundations standing behind him) to Alexander the Great, cementing this relationship between the development of western philosophy and conquest. There is a constant found embedded within this historical reality- that of the excluded middle. The construction of binaries to encase and protect what we call truth. And this exclusionary practice is what leads to the “profession” itself.

“Philosophers love to know more than anyone- which is to say, we philsophers love thinking about knowing, trying to understand knowledge… (as outposts of metaphsics and epistemology) Questions about the nature of being are reduced to questions about the nature of mind, which, whatever it might be, is the “it” that knows and understands and conceptualizes. But precisely because the philosopher knows- knows how knowing works and is able to pierce through to the essence of things- the philosopher is a cultural arbiter of meaning and truth… They would become kings- emperors.”

And, not inconsequentional, that exclusionary practice hands one a road paved with polemic, one where Smith “imagined the world’s problems ammounted to a failure of analysis.” Good arguments will save us.

That is, until you are forced to attend for the lived life.

Smith has this great confession,

“As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manicheans and Pelagians with iron-clad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers… I used to imagine that my calling was to defend The Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.”

Having recently finished the great book Augustine the African, I’m compelled towards the ways that book illuminated those taught tenants (within Protestantism) as part of a more nuanced picture of Augustine wrestling with his own sense of this luminous dark.

Here Smith turns to something more revelatory than observed. He speaks about how that observation, that such efforts are about winning, is actually a facade for the real desire that this “knowledge will save” mindset obscures- that need to belong. Smith doesn’t say this, but my own interaction here wonders about the ways in which those with knowledge about how knowledge works become experts in isolating themselves from a world where what really matters to people is their constructs. Where philosophy’s aim is to break the apparent illusions that hold our lives intact, it also means breaking from the connections those illusions create and sustain. Thus why philosophy (or the well read thinker) turns inwards towards it’s own sense of itself, convincing itself that what set one on this path to begin with is what truly matters- seeking the Truth of things. As Smith puts it, “Mabye philosophy begins in wonder, but a doctorate in philsophy is where wonder goes to die,” bent on the conquering the niche territories we have reduced knowledge to in order to control it.

But Smith pushes this notion further. It is not simply about the one with the truth learning how to belong in the world of the living, where the truth matters less than the illusion; it is about learning how that way of thinking is in tself symptomatic of the larger problem. Here he comes back to that cloud of unknowing, A cloud that cannot be dispersed and conquered by our “winning” the argument. What happens when the same knowledge that hands us progress and technology cannot prevent “the deep rifts in our social fabric.”

Here that observation about belonging resurfaces. I’ve been thinking about this idea over the course of this morning. That exclusionary practice might appear like we are rightly pushing untruths into the distance in order to help ourselves and others see more clearly, but where it applies to the lived life, such actions take the shape of pushing away those whom we come to say in the process- “we no longer know.” Precisely because, that we now know what its true and they do not, the one whom is still in the darkness cannot see us, even as we endeavor to place them out of sight and mind. It’s an irony that underlies this approach to knowledge. What is revealed through this act is the fact that in doing so we come to accept that “they no longer know you either.”

The sort of knowledge we have mastered “in modernity” cannot “solve” this problem. In fact, it would appear, as Smith points out, that the more knowledge we accumulate and thus control in the language and form of modernity, the more anxiety and unahappiness “besets us.” If Smith is right, this is because of the distance it creates, between one another, and likewise us and the mystery, ” leaving our lives to be “shadowed by alienatation and distrust” of anything and anyone we deem not to be the truth.

Smith goes on to describe a life changing moment for him, where he faced something out of his control (or the control of his philosophical weapons), and eventually found something that reached beyond “an exchange of ideas,” which he calls an act of “re-narration.” Learning, as an act of imagination, to embody a different story.

Holding “swirls of contradiction…” This is what allows us to truly enter into the logical implications of whatever story/narrative is actually governing our lived lives. This is the real interest of the logical argument. At the end of the day, story, not philosophy, is the universal language. If philosophy is to have real and true formative power when it comes to awakening us to knoweldge of what is true, and Smith believes it does and it can, it needs to begin with desire. Our desire to know Truth. And subsequently, it needs to end with msytery. Apart from that there is nothing to draw us towards Truth in a way that can preserve it and allow it to be known.

Smith brings in a different question then- why do we want to know? What do we (actually) want when we want to know? Both questions that lead to the central observation that holds it altogether- the recognition that I (we) want to be known. There is a word for this- phenomenology. Rather than a dusty, intellectualized conception, this word, if properly recaptured and reconstituted in practice, has the power to reawaken the wonder behind this desire for knowledge. More importantly, it places us directly back into the realm of the living, where knowing comes through necessary participation in the spaces we occupy.

I’ve been thinking (and praying) this morning about how this intersects with my own story and life. What, as someone who very much resonates with this interest in philosophy and who spends a lot of time reading a whole lot of books, does this speak into my own tendencies and prisons? One thing I can say for sure- I know this luminous dark.

I wonder where and how I am caught up in this polemic. Perhaps there is a fine line that is easy to step over in any given moment between engaging this modern philosophical landscape on its own terms and the desire to speak to the issues and frustrations Smith is tabling (is it a polemic to go after the penchant for polemic?). A greater awareness of this line I think can be a good thing.

I know the isolation he describes. When so much of the necessary work seems to require the dismantling of the world’s constructs (including within Christianity), it hands you a mix of disinterest, anger, rejection, puzzlement, and distance from others. Where this desire for knowledge means you exist everywhere but seemingly belong nowhere. There are two things Smith references that I think are helpful here- offering a reminder that forming convictions is necessary for any pursuit of knowledge. Which is more a recognition that we all have them in the form of a guiding narrative. This matters if we are to reclaim a proper redefining of knowledge as more (or something other) than our modernist terms of true information. It exposes not just our interpretation , but the interpreter. It’s a reminder of the persons, and indeed the whole of creation, occupying the mix of this shared experience.

Lastly, and I’ve included a screenshot here of the fuller discourse, I resonated deeply with Smith’s descriptive of how he has learned to move from from the intellect of the head to true knowledge of the lived in spaces of this world. He speaks of needing the artists and the mystics. to act as a brdige. I have often spoken about how for me the cinema is like a sanctuary, a way of moving from where I am (often in my head) towards an encounter with the transcendent. With God. With the mystery. To me it is a sacred space. Reading also occupies this space, more so these days with the continued disenchantment of cinema as a space once meant to evoke wonder. Here Smith legitimizes this practice as an essential part of knowing. Of seeing it as a way to expose the limits of logic (our our logical arguments), and challenge our methodologies of control. It’s a reminder of why these sacred spaces matter both to our convictions and our desire to know, and above all to our ability to belong.