News

Worship Songwriter Vicky Beeching Comes Out as Gay

Kate Shellnutt

The CCM worship world has its Jennifer Knapp moment.

Christianity Today August 14, 2014
Nicholas Dawkes / VickyBeeching.com

A popular writer and singer of CCM worship songs, Vicky Beeching, came out as gay Wednesday in an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Independent.

“What Jesus taught was a radical message of welcome and inclusion and love,” said the 35-year-old Anglican, who recently left the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) world to become a TV news commentator, but still makes a living from royalties when American churches sing her worship songs. “I feel certain God loves me just the way I am, and I have a huge sense of calling to communicate that to young people.”

Beeching is one of the most prominent CCM singers to come out since Jennifer Knapp's much-discussed revelation in 2010.

Beeching, who sings the popular worship song “Glory to God Forever,” described experiencing same-sex attraction starting at age 13 and going on to feel conflicted in evangelical settings, where church leaders would pray against the “demon of homosexuality” they believed to be within her.

She studied theology at Oxford and went on to spend much of her 20s in the Christian music scene in the United States, living in Nashville and San Diego. Over the past decade, Beeching has recorded three albums, performed with America's best-known Christian artists, and had her songs appear on popular compilations such as WOW Worship and Here I Am to Worship.

Her official bio notes that "the genre she wrote and played is known as Contemporary Christian Music" and explains:

[Beeching] was offered a recording contract with (what was then) the biggest Christian record label in the world – EMI’s Sparrow Records. Accepting their offer, Vicky relocated to the States for almost a decade, living in the ‘Bible Belt’ of Nashville Tennessee and becoming a familiar face and voice in American Christian media.

Writing songs that appeared on gold albums, Vicky’s compositions feature in the ‘top 25 most sung’ in North American churches. Her lyrics have been translated into a multiplicity of languages and hundreds of thousands of people sing her songs in churches across the globe every month. Her music has been part of the soundtrack to a generation of Christian teenagers’ lives.

Today's Christian Music, praising her Eternity Invades album in 2010, described her as "being touted as Christian music's 'next big thing,'" and "having mentored with the likes of Matt Redman and Tim Hughes, Beeching's place in the modern worship scene seemed like a no-brainer."

“Glory to God Forever,” which she performs with Steve Fee, is currently one of the 100 most popular songs sung in churches, as measured by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI).

Beeching "still considers herself an evangelical," writes veteran British religion reporter Ruth Gledhill after interviewing the singer, "although she no longer attends charismatic evangelical services and now prefers the more traditional services of London's main cathedrals."

"I am not angry with the Church, even though it has been very difficult," she told Gledhill. "The Church is still my family. Family do not always agree or see eye to eye. But family stick together, and I am committed to being part of the Church, working for change."

Beeching now lives in London, where she discusses church news on the BBC and other news outlets. She came out to her parents earlier this year, and to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his daughter, Katharine Welby Roberts. Though the Church of England does not recognize same-sex unions, Beeching has previously vocalized her support for equal marriage and LGBT rights.

“The Church's teaching was the reason that I lived in so much shame and isolation and pain for all those years. But rather than abandon it and say it's broken, I want to be part of the change,” she told The Independent.

Beeching still relies on royalties from her worship music to make a living, and she wrote in April that speaking out about LGBT rights is costing her. "As a result of raising my voice to support equal marriage, I’ve received lots of messages from conservative American churches saying they will 'boycott my songs.' If they don’t get sung in the mega-churches of North America, my royalties basically stop."

In recent years, a handful of Christian artists have come out as gay, including Ray Boltz, gospel singer Tonéx, and most famously, Jennifer Knapp, who described her hiatus from Christian music and her decision to come out in an interview with CT. CT covered the resulting debate as well as how Christian retail and radio responded. Knapp is releasing a book about her story, focusing on her faith and sexuality, in the fall.

Pastors

Pastoral Vulnerability

Steve Hall

Life feels out of control. Is this the core of ministry?

Leadership Journal August 14, 2014

Saint Peter, writing to a group of churches scattered across an area the size of California, opens his first canonized letter with three short words:

“Chosen exiles, dispersed …”

As his letter unfolds, it quickly becomes apparent that to be “chosen exiles, dispersed” is rather uncomfortable. It’s been debated over the centuries if any of the churches Peter wrote to were undergoing anything that could honestly be described as significant persecution. The consensus seems to be that though violent persecution was likely minimal, the difficult lives of political exiles within the Roman empire were made nothing if not more difficult upon encountering Jesus. They’d been upended by the gospel.

An upending with which Peter was quite familiar. An upending which Peter would symbolize in his upside-down crucifixion some short years later. The knotty tension in which the church exists as “chosen exiles, dispersed” is described best by Douglas Harink, who says, “To be exiled means to be vulnerable with the vulnerability of Christ, to live ‘out of control,’ to suffer under a foreign power, to long for the homeland.” This exilic vulnerability, Harink points out (and Peter tells us directly), is not some oversight or ecclesiological banking error. It’s the chosen plan of God.

Modeling vulnerability

Vulnerable and out of control. If this is how the church is to exist, it must be modeled clearly by her shepherds, which is sort of the point, not so much of Peter’s letters but his life.

Henri Nouwen picks up on this in his little lightning-storm of a book, In the Name of Jesus. Nouwen looks intently at the restoration of Peter toward the end of John’s Gospel account. After Jesus has finished asking Peter if he loves him he says, "In all truth I tell you when you were young you put on your belt and walked where you liked; but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and somebody else will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go."

Living this way—downward, in exile, vulnerable, foreign—honestly, truly sucks. It’s counter-intuitive.

Nouwen suggests that Jesus is teaching us through the life of Peter that, “The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”

But here’s a little something to chew on: living this way—downward, in exile, vulnerable, foreign—honestly, truly sucks. It’s counter-intuitive.

Living in exile

My wife and I have been heading toward a ministry transition for over a year now. Since I’m a vocational pastor, we’re not just looking at trading in some work friends, or meeting new neighbors, or searching for a new place to worship. We’re trading in all of it, all at once.

Which, I realize, in the grand scheme of things, is not that big of a deal. There are people undergoing suffering in this world to a degree that I cannot even imagine. Me having to find a new job or a new city or a new coffee shop barely even registers. But my life is my life, and it’s one that I have to own and give away simultaneously. Living out of control feels out of control regardless of privilege or status.

The thing is though, I’ve been failing. Miserably.

God keeps handing me water balloons with a wink, asking if I’m ready to have some fun, and the only thing I can think to do is squeeze the water right out of them. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve blame-shifted. I’ve developed some fairly serious health problems. I’ve yelled at my wife over nothing. I’ve ignored my daughter. I’ve poured on the sticky-sweet syrup of self-pity and self-loathing. Like a crash-test-dummy, I’ve repeatedly accelerated toward the brick-wall of vulnerability, yammering on like a David Foster Wallace character just before the blackout.

In the process of trying to white-knuckle my way through to survival, I’ve completely forgotten what Robert Farrar Capon told me in Between Noon & Three, how this whole thing, church, life, death, all of it, is just one big hilarious gift. I’ve forgotten that my people don’t need a pastor who lives without struggle. I’ve forgotten that my first identity isn’t as a shepherd, but as a sheep. I’ve forgotten to . . .

"Trust him. And when you have done that, you are living the life of grace. No matter what happens to you in the course of that trusting—no matter how many waverings you may have, no matter how many suspicions that you have bought a poke with no pig in it, no matter how much heaviness and sadness your lapses, vices, indispositions, and bratty whining may cause you—you believe simply that Somebody Else, by his death and resurrection, has made it all right, and you just say thank you and shut up. The whole slop-closet full of mildewed performances (which is all you have to offer) is simply your death; it is Jesus who is your life. If he refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, he certainly isn't going to flunk you because your faith isn't so hot. You can fail utterly, therefore, and still live the life of grace. You can fold up spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be safe. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead—and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea."

In the few days it’s been since I started writing this, we’ve been given an end date at our current job, and we still have no idea when the next one may start, or where it will be. Every third breath I take feels like I’ve got a chest full of water.

I’m taking one step further into exile, deeper into vulnerability and out-of-control-ness. I’m inhabiting the very place Saint Peter said I would, the very place he described to the scattered churches of Asia Minor, the very place he lived and died. But you know how Peter ends his little intro to the people he describes as seeds scattered across the dirt and manure of the world?

He ends it by telling them—telling me—“Grace and peace are yours. In abundance.”

At the moment, Steve and his all female family reside in weird and wonderful Portland, Oregon. The next moment may require something different and they're learning how to be ok with that.

Ideas

‘The Giver’ Keeps Giving

Elissa Cooper

Columnist; Contributor

The case for not ignoring outrageous truth.

Odeya Rush and Brenton Thwaites in 'The Giver'

Odeya Rush and Brenton Thwaites in 'The Giver'

Christianity Today August 14, 2014
David Bloomer / The Weinstein Company

Alissa's note: I asked Elissa Cooper, CT's assistant editor who recently saw the film adaptation of The Giver (out this weekend), to write about some of her thoughts on the books and the film. And I'm very glad I did.

We'll also run a review of the film this weekend.

Four and a half years ago, as an intern for CT, I visited a home that provided aftercare for trafficked teenage girls. Between interviews, I participated in their daily lives: We ate meals together, went shopping, and just sat and talked. One night, some workers talked about how one of the hardest challenges involved hearing the girls’ stories.

“Jordan”’s past experiences were pretty horrific. Nightmares plagued her. She shared her memories with the others so she could talk through issues and pray and try to alleviate the pain. But in hearing Jordan’s memories, others had nightmares and struggled with the pain and evilness of it all.

When we reached a break in the conversation, I asked, “Have you ever read The Giver?”

It sounds like a strange question. Why think of a secular juvenile book that has absolutely nothing to do with sex trafficking?

But I had my reasons for not suggesting a Christian story. First, the Christian workers already had theology and spirituality texts at their disposal—they even wrote some of the books. Second, not all the residents claimed a Christian faith, so this provided another outlet for reaching the girls. But most importantly, The Giver—the book and its subsequent companions in the Giver Quartet as well as the recent film—makes a strong case for the importance of sharing memory, both for the individual and the community. As a result, it also dips into spiritual matters. And the film goes even deeper.

In case you’re not familiar with The Giver, the 1993 book won the Newbery Medal. (It also landed on frequently challenged or banned books, but more on that later.) It is widely considered the forerunner of dystopian literature for children and young adults. Yet in a 2007 interview, author Lois Lowry said that she didn’t set out to create a dystopia when writing it. The community was “without war, poverty, crime, alcoholism, divorce—and without the troubling memories of those things. Only gradually did I begin to understand that I was not creating a utopia—but a dystopia. I slowly understood that I was writing about a group of people who had at some point in the past made collective choices and terrible sacrifices in order to achieve a level of comfort and security.”

Jonas, the main character of The Giver, realizes this after becoming the Receiver of Memory. The Giver holds all the memories of the world past, and gives them to Jonas so Jonas can remember once the Giver is gone. The memories help serve the Elders in making decisions for the community. In the book, they once talked about increasing the size of a family unit from two children to three children. But the Giver reminds them that the food supply might stretch, leading to shortages and hunger, so the family unit size remains the same.

The Elders, who assigned Jonas as Receiver, consider this a utilitarian position, but Jonas sees it in a different way. Jonas receives beautiful memories of things he’s never experienced or heard about, like sledding, but also terrible things, like war. And in addition to grappling with the new knowledge, Jonas faces isolation. Only he and the Giver know such things existed. As Jonas’s friends learn their new jobs, they can talk about their experiences and still play together. Jonas stands alone. And the burden of memory is too much to bear alone.

Despite acclaim, concerned parents challenged the book, claiming infanticide, euthanasia, and scenes dealing with violence or sex were inappropriate for young readers. Some claimed that it “desensitized” readers to those issues.

At the end of the screening, we talked as the credits rolled. One point of discussion involved one of the story’s most controversial scenes: (Spoiler) Jonas’s father, who cares for the babies as Nurturer, euthanizes an infant. The community doesn’t allow twins, so the smaller one is sent to “Elsewhere.” Jonas and the others assume it’s just another community.

One viewer had looked away during that scene. The rep, who had watched it at home, told her teenage son to look away. Another viewer brought up how that scene terrified children—especially twins—reading it for school, and how it wasn’t appropriate for younger readers. But I disagree.

As a kid, I frequently took the books my older sister left around the house. I read the last chapter or so and then taunted her that I knew what happened. (I understand now that this is obnoxious, but I thought it was hilarious. Plus, even though it was “naughty,” my parents could hardly punish me for reading books.) The Giver fell victim to my prank. And then I read it all. By any “official” standard, I was not supposed to read it. I barely met the recommended age level. It was totally unsupervised—I didn’t have a teacher leading discussion or fellow readers to talk with. But I understood the language and the content. And it resonated with what I was starting to understand as a kid but couldn’t quite put into words: The world doesn’t fall neatly into good and bad. Things that people tolerate or seem acceptable shouldn’t be so.

I later saw my sister’s middle-school class perform that scene. It hardly desensitized me. Instead, I—like others—wanted to scream with Jonas about the injustice of it; the waste of human life; the betrayal of someone you think is good and loving and should know better. You don’t want to shrug your shoulders and go on with your day as if nothing has happened, like Jonas’s father. That defeats the point of the story—the scene is supposed to invoke emotion and a response. You don’t want to ignore the outrageous truth.

Consider Josiah. Josiah was 8 years old when he inherited the throne in Judah. His father “did evil in the eyes of the Lord” (2 Kings 21:2) and led others astray, but Josiah followed the ways of King David. How did Josiah know better? His father had established a normalcy in the kingdom, where idols and sacrifices flourished. Josiah had people to lead him in the right direction, and then in the 18th year of his reign, they showed him the Book of the Law. Josiah “tore his robes” (2 Kings 22:11). With the knowledge in front of him, Josiah recognized that he and the people had disobeyed God and changes needed to be made—pronto. Again and again in the Bible, people recover a lost law, a lost book, a lost memory. And those things need to be remembered and practiced.

It’s hard to expose children to the truth—it breaks innocence. The world becomes more scary. But how can we make the right decision if we don’t have the knowledge available? How do we fall into a mindset that’s hard to get out of if there’s nothing else to challenge it?

The same interview asked Lowry about giving the characters’ biblical names—Jonas, Gabriel, and one of my favorites, happy, fun-loving Asher (who, unfortunately, turns out to be a real wet blanket in the movie)—but Lowry claimed that was unintentional. “If I had begun to think in literally Christian terms, I would have backed off of the project because I have no interest in writing ‘religious’ books,” Lowry said. “Still, clearly, the theology is there, inherent in the story.”

And the movie lets loose on spiritual talk and images. The Giver talks about how faith means seeing beyond what’s in front of Jonas. In his impassioned plea to stop an execution, the Giver talks about faith, hope, and love, and how one leads to another. The filmmakers could have slipped a little Frederick Buechner in the speech: “The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. . . . To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping.” One of the memories Jonas experiences is a father holding his newborn child, tearing up in the wonder and joy of his own creation. It’s not just a memory, but a possible hope for him if he lived in a different world. As one character says, things have been “stolen” from her—emotions, hope, love. (I totally want to write another post just about how this character is a mash-up that includes Gabe’s mother in Son, the fourth Giver book.)

Die-hard fans that grew up with the book might be disappointed that the movie doesn’t stick too closely to the story. But it stays true to the message. And it actually made me love the story more.

I had feared that the setting looked too futuristic and would take away from the story, that it was just a gimmick to try to compete with blockbusters. Yet it makes the story more powerful. As the Giver shares memories with Jonas, the flashing images are from our world, our time: mundane things, like a child laughing in the rain or a couple kissing, to world events, like tearing down the Berlin Wall or the man in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, to Nelson Mandela’s smiling face. The film’s depiction made The Giver’s world all the more real—and plausible.

Elissa Cooper is assistant editor of Christianity Today magazine.

Watch This Way

News

Top UK Christian Singer Investigated for Alleged Sex Abuse at 1985 Billy Graham Crusade

Timothy C. Morgan

Sir Cliff Richard, who denies allegations as ‘completely false,’ is latest British celebrity affected by Jimmy Savile fallout.

Christianity Today August 14, 2014
Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer/Flickr

In the wake of allegations that Jimmy Savile, the late UK broadcaster, sexually abused dozens of children, British police today searched a residence of a top Christian entertainer. Sir Cliff Richard is alleged to have sexually abused a 16-year-old boy around the time Richard was taking part in a Billy Graham crusade in the mid-1980s.

Richard, who publicly revealed his Christianity at a 1966 Graham crusade, denied the allegations as "completely false."

The 2012 allegations against Savile, who died two years ago, have snowballed into a major, nationwide investigation named Operation Yewtree, which is looking into alleged abuse as long as four decades ago. There are 400 investigations ongoing.

"Richard is the latest famous name in Britain to be embroiled in sexual allegations from decades ago," notes the Associated Press. "British police have made a slew of arrests after revelations that several public figures, including late BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile, used their fame to get away with sexual abuse."

UK police say the search of Richard's residence is not directly part of Yewtree, but information about the alleged assault surfaced independently, leading police to open an investigation.

Richard denied the allegations in a statement given to the BBC:

For many months I have been aware of allegations against me of historic impropriety which have been circulating online. The allegations are completely false. Up until now I have chosen not to dignify the false allegations with a response, as it would just give them more oxygen. However, the police attended my apartment in Berkshire today without notice, except it would appear to the press. I am not presently in the UK but it goes without saying that I will cooperate fully should the police wish to speak to me. Beyond stating that today's allegation is completely false it would not be appropriate to say anything further until the police investigation has concluded.

Media reports indicate that the allegations concern Richard's conduct during the Graham Crusade in Sheffield, England, in the summer of 1985. CT in its Aug. 9, 1985, issue reported that Richard performed during one day of the eight-day event. His appearance at the Bramall Lane soccer stadium boosted attendance that night to 47,200 people. This was the largest attendance at a Graham event in Britain since 1955.

Richard is one of the UK's most popular and successful singers ever, having sold 21.5 million singles. That's more than any other British male artist. He performed at Buckingham Palace in 2012.

Richard, who received honorary knighthood in 1995, is a well-known philanthropist. In 1966, he publicly said he tithed on his income and has been a major donor to the British poverty-fighting charity Tearfund.

CT will update this report as new information becomes available.

[Photo credit: Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer/Flickr]

Books
Review

The Broken Beauty of the Global Church

Brian M. Howell

Tim Keesee reports from places where persecuted Christians live with suffering and joy.

Carlos Adampol Galindo / Flickr

In Wheaton, Illinois, where I live, I'm surrounded by families who have fled their countries, leaving war, famine, political oppression, and sometimes religious persecution. Our small church is blessed to occasionally have one of these families join us. The depths of faith forged in hardship often overwhelm us. We are also reminded that millions of our foreign-born brothers and sisters, and millions more living without the hope of the gospel, continue to suffer.

Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World's Difficult Places

Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World's Difficult Places

Tim Keesee (Author)

Crossway

240 pages

$13.90

These people, living in dangerous settings, are the subject of Tim Keesee's book Dispatches from the Front: Stories of Gospel Advance in the World's Difficult Places (Crossway). Keesee, founder of Frontline Missions International, compiles stories from his travels to places where Christians live with profound suffering and joy. Though some of the accounts lack context, and some of the language veers into the sensational, Keesee's stories and vivid writing bring the reader close to heroic and suffering people around the world.

Keesee's organization originally produced a DVD series that documented his travels. The book follows a similar format, giving vignettes of places and people across the globe. In some places, we learn about the political and religious history through Keesee's tours of museums and historical sites, which adds a rich context to the stories of missionaries and local believers.

At other points, the book fails to supply relevant background information. Keesee tells the harrowing stories of believers in Pakistan, fearing for their lives during a night of anti-Christian rioting he experienced firsthand. But he neglects to mention the political upheaval in that country, which would have helped to make sense of the violent convulsions. And occasionally, Keesee's descriptions tilt towards flippancy: He describes a Hindu deity, for instance, as resembling "something from a bad movie."

Yet the book provides an encouraging reminder that God's people continue to stand in his power around the world. We meet Dennis, a poor yet influential pastor in Liberia, who works with his North American partner to drill wells, preach the gospel, and lead Christians in villages throughout his country. Grace, a Filipina missionary working with her husband, Noe, leads a church and cares for sex trafficking survivors and HIV/AIDS patients in Cambodia. Allan Yuan, a 90-year-old pastor in China, baptizes dozens of believers on the banks of the Ye Xi River after spending decades in prison for his faith.

But these are not always stories of triumph. Keesee remembers the life of Gayle Williams, a nurse ministering to children in Kabul, Afghanistan, who was killed by a sniper's bullet. He tells of Ika, a Muslim-background believer from Indonesia, who was rejected by her family, kept from her children, and cut off from her community. These stories reveal that God does not always take away our pain even as he comforts us within it.

Dispatches from the Front assures us that God has raised people around the globe to bring his Word into difficult circumstances. Keesee brings us face to face with the church in its broken beauty, working to see the gospel go forth. Where others call for violence and blood, we are called to bring peace. We are called to be content in all things in Jesus Christ, who gives us strength. We are called to be broken with our brothers and sisters, with all who suffer and weep. And as we recognize the church in these brave people, we are.

Brian M. Howell is associate professor of anthropology at Wheaton College and the author of Short-Term Mission: An Ethnography of Christian Travel Narrative and Experience (IVP Academic).

Shark Week Jumps the Shark

Caryn Rivadeneira

Discovery Channel’s popular (and once educational) series gets trapped in gimmick.

Her.meneutics August 14, 2014
chrispiascik / Flickr

My friend took one look at promo staring Rob Lowe, “water-skiing” two harnessed sharks while tossing chum from a bona fide chum-bucket to the great whites leaping behind him and joked, “Shark Week has officially jumped the shark.”

But that arguably happened long ago, when Discovery Channel’s Shark Week decided to play up its popularity, not with more of what made people love it in the first place—educational shows about sharks—but with shark-themed ridiculousness.

There’s the mascot Bob the Shark, live kick-off parties in California, and ideas for how to hold your own Shark Week party at home. And just look at these actual Shark Week show titles: Lair of the Mega Shark #ExtraSharky, Zombie Sharks, Sharkageddon. (Looks like someone’s trying to compete with the hype over Syfy’s so-bad-it’s-good TV movie Sharknado.)

I personally lost faith in Shark Week when the network captivated and confused audiences with the well-disguised mockumentary Megalodon. I was far from the only one who Googled this mysterious, ancient shark of the deep, only to find that it’s not a modern-day monster, but long extinct. Like many viewers, I felt duped. Turns out, they’re at it again with yet another “dramatized” story of a giant shark of dubious existence.

And yet, here I am, tuning into yet another Shark Week, with all its campy, over-the-top programming. Even the ads get me—from the poster in the train station of a great white rising from foamy waters to the promos on Facebook. In my house, Shark Week has consistently succeeded at getting all five of us in one small room, in front of one small(ish) TV without arguing about what we were going to watch for a bit once they come in from playing. The decision is made for us. Duh, it’s Shark Week.

There are still minimal shark-related lessons to learn through Shark Week, but beyond that, it has become more of a shared cultural phenomenon than an educational experience. Millions of people are watching Shark Week—in fact, more than ever thanks to a boost in female viewers.

While I doubt we’ll ever get asked, “Where were you when you watched your first Shark Week ?,” it has become part of our pop culture fabric. On 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan spouts the advice, “Live every week like it’s Shark Week.” And Macklemore’s sings lyric, “And I’m eating at the beat like you gave a little speed to a great white shark on Shark Week. Rawr.”

With all the hype and silliness, Shark Week plays up the death tolls and dangers of these sharks more and more, with great whites seemingly the star of every show. But at the heart of the programming there used to be this tension between our fear of sharks and their natural prowess and the relatively unlikelihood of ever being caught up with one. It revealed the irrationality yet prevalence of our human fears.

Like many people, I love water, but I’m more than a little afraid of much of what lurks beneath the waves. I love to swim, but I hate to think about what swims alongside or below me in lakes or oceans. Be they tiny fish or huge, be they harmless or deadly. But of course, I’m afraid because I do not understand. Which is true for most things.

We have good reason to fear—in the biblical sense—sharks. But being wiser about them, their behavior, their location, the literal warning signs and signals, help. This understanding not only keeps us safe from them, but keeps them safe from us. To move from being terrified of an animal to being in awe of its beauty and strength and smarts and teeth is to move toward being better stewards of these creatures we were called to care for on this earth.

An increasingly slimmer portion of Shark Week shows that focus on sharks, as they are, without gimmick. It’s in these clips that Shark Week inspires worship (or at least it once did). Ultimately, I’ve realized, I love Shark Week because I love the Creator of Sharks. And in learning more about these amazing predators of the deep, ones I pray I will never, ever swim alongside or above or below, I learn more about the amazing God who made them.

Who knows what first sparked the first shark-thought in God’s mind. Who knows what he was thinking as he pored over the initial designs, row after row of teeth, the telltale fins, the hammer head? These are thoughts of God I might otherwise never have had. I suppose the thoughts may have flitted in and out as I turned the pages of the shark book my kids have or as I walked around the Shedd Aquarium, in neither place am I seeing sharks in their sharkiest sharkiness. Shark Week has the potential to give us that, in full doses and in giant gulps. And in doing so they also give (unwittingly, most likely) full doses and giant gulps of our Creator in all his Creative Creat-i-ness.

If you’re too distracted by Rob Lowe and everything else on Discovery to marvel at the God-made sharks, try the straightforward National Geographic Sharkfest. Well, until they inevitably jump the shark one day, too.

This article was originally published as part of Her.Meneutics, Christianity Today's blog for women.

When Black Victims Become Trending Hashtags

Ebony Adedayo, guest writer

African Americans are speaking out against modern-day racism. But who’s listening?

Her.meneutics August 13, 2014
(Jeff Roberson / AP)

By some measures, every 28 hours, a black man is killed in America.

This statistic rang true as I turned on my computer Saturday evening, scrolled through my Twitter feed, and saw #Ferguson, #MikeBrown, and other references to a police shooting where an unarmed teenager was killed in suburban St. Louis. I opened another browser window to search, and my worst fears were confirmed: another black teenager lost his life as a result of racial profiling. Another son, another brother, another friend lost due to police violence. #MikeBrown is the latest victim of racial profiling in America. Days before him, there was #JohnCrawford, and before Crawford, there was #EricGarner, #RenishaMcBride, #JordanDavis, #TrayvonMartin, and #OscarGrant. In 2012 alone, at least 313 men died as a result of the extreme targeting. Lynching may be outlawed, but Jim Crow still exists.

Decades ago, or even years ago, names like #MikeBrown would have been buried in news briefs and death notices, if even mentioned at all. But as the result of Twitter, blacks have been able to create awareness, raise support and push the conversation forward around the issues that most resonate with our experience.

In fact, blacks use Twitter at rates higher than that of whites. This is the case because Twitter, more than any other social media platform, has given us the power to challenge the behavior of law enforcement and self-appointed vigilantes in a way that traditional forms of media do not.

Such was the case following #MikeBrown’s death. After the media posted a photo that showed Brown in a negative light, black twitter users started the hashtag, #Iftheygunnedmedown. The tweets have grown into a campaign, with users sharing pairs of photos of themselves and questioning the way that people of color are often vilified in the news.

But while these conversations trend and develop among blacks, others are often oblivious to the news or what the trending hashtags mean. It’s a result of the “filter bubble,” our tendency to isolate ourselves online from views that oppose our own. On social media, we tend to follow people who are like us – people who look like us, think like us, and believe like us.

That’s why even well-connected Internet users can miss out on a whole dimension of the news, while certain groups continue to discuss issues among themselves. The conversations among people of color can be so far removed from the overall Twitter chatter that the term #BlackTwitter emerged to describe the “cultural force” of young blacks online.

Those who aren’t paying attention to #BlackTwitter but happen upon the latest incident, may miss the nuance and importance of these news stories, activists campaigns, and hashtags. They ask, Why do these deaths matter? Why do black people pay more attention to this than to black on black violence? What are these people doing wrong that they are getting shot in the first place?

These are the wrong questions. Questions like these trivialize the daily struggle against systemic racism (which #BlackTwitter readily calls out and rallies against). Questions like these ignore this country’s history of violence against black people and even further perpetuates it because they fail to recognize our humanity and self-worth. Every 28 hours a black man is killed in America. But things can change.

While we have been dealing with hundreds of years of racial tension and oppression in this country, my hope in Jesus and the kingdom of God among us in the here and now, leads me to believe that we can create a different reality. As a mother of a black son, this is my hope for my child and every other black child.

But hashtag activism can’t foster the change alone. #MikeBrown raises awareness but it doesn’t change systems. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown provokes critical thinking, but it doesn’t shift worldviews. Change isn’t going to happen just through these essential tools but through Jesus. As a result of the reconciling nature of the cross which tears down walls between blacks and whites, I know that this pattern of racial profiling can come to an absolute end. This is what my faith tells me, this is what the Spirit of God inspires me to believe and to imagine.

I believe that Christians can play a very significant role in shifting this paradigm. As people of God, we can study the history of racism in this country and get a better understanding about how it relates to current practices and policies. Whites and other groups of color, can recognize and repent of their own racial bias and teach their peers to do the same.

After developing a racial justice lens in which to approach these issues, we can collectively lift our voices and prophesy against the entities in our society that devalue black lives, and that see us as criminals instead of fellow human beings. And we can partner with the folks on the ground who have already working on these issues – it is important that nonblack Christians join the conversation but not dominate the conversation or center the conversation on their experience.

Every 28 hours, a black man is killed in America.

This is our reality today, but I know through Christ it can be different tomorrow.

Ebony Adedayo was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and moved to the Twin Cities to attend college. She earned a B.A. in Pastoral Studies from North Central University and a Master of Global and Contextual Studies from Bethel Seminary. A licensed minister, she has served in youth, young adult, and mission’s ministries and is passionate about the intersection of faith, justice, and reconciliation. She is the author of Dancing on Hot Coals and Embracing a Holistic Faith: Essays on Biblical Justice and writes at www.ebonyjohanna.com. You can find her on Twitter as @ebonyjohanna and on Facebook.

This article was originally published as part of Her.Meneutics, Christianity Today's blog for women.

Theology

Alec Hill: Inside My Slavery

Alec Hill

How Jesus’ most troubling parable finally made sense to me.

Shutterstock

Scripture contains more than 40 of Jesus' parables. Some are so well known, hospitals (Good Shepherd) and laws (Good Samaritan) are named after them. Others confound readers today as much as they likely did their first hearers. And one parable has been all but forgotten—at least in the West. Recently I shared it with five U.S. ministry leaders. In their 130 collective years of service, not one of them had given a talk on it or heard it preached from the pulpit.

Contrast their response with that of a Nigerian friend, who told me that the parable is one of his favorite teachings of Jesus. So why would the parable resonate in Nigeria and seemingly fall flat in the United States?

The parable—found only in the Gospel of Luke—was delivered relatively late in Jesus' ministry, to his closest followers. It belonged to a set of teachings on discipleship:

Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, "Come here at once and take your place at the table"? Would you not rather say to him, "Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink"? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, "We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!" (17:7–10, NRSV)

The plot is simple. A small household employs a doulos—Greek for "slave" given how domestic bondage worked in Greco-Roman times. A jack-of-all-trades, the slave plows a field and tends sheep during his first shift, and cooks meals and cleans up during his second.

The plot hinges on two questions: One, would the master invite the slave to sit down and eat? And two, would the master thank the slave for his work? At first blush, it seems the response to both questions should be yes. The slave has worked hard all day. He deserves a break. For the sake of manners, the master should express appreciation for his labors.

But, biblically speaking, the correct answer to both questions is no.

Take Up Your Yoke

Thomas Jefferson once took a sharp instrument to the Bible to excise passages that offended his Enlightenment sensibilities. In a similar spirit, if given the option, I would consider deleting Luke 17:7–10. Throughout the mid-19th century, many British and American slave owners, clergy, and government officials used this and other Scripture passages to defend the institution of slavery. Today, as we continue to witness the sad effects of institutional racism and stories like 12 Years a Slave, which remind us of past brutality, we instinctively read this parable as unfair and mean-spirited.

We must remember, though, that parables are designed to teach a limited number of focused lessons, not to be applied in every detail. And while the characters in Jesus' parables sometimes practice unseemly behavior, Jesus is not embracing such conduct. Nor is he endorsing slavery, a practice diametrically opposed to his first recorded sermon (Luke 4:16–21) and subsequent teachings.

Still, I much prefer a similar parable in Luke 12. There a master returns home, finds his slaves alert, dons an apron, and serves them. I've heard this text preached many times from American pulpits. So if I initially react adversely to the Luke 17 parable, why am I also drawn to it? Why do I return to it time and time again?

Because it directly touches my deficiencies. By temperament, I am a people pleaser, and I am prone to narcissism. Combined, these traits produce a watered-down discipleship.

To counter the notion that I am the center of the universe, for the past eight years I have started my quiet time every morning with the same four words: I am your slave.

As I've pursued the disciple-as-slave metaphor, a rich vein of Scripture has opened up to me. Jesus used it a lot: "Take up your yoke"; "No slave can serve two masters"; "If I, your master, have washed your feet . . . do likewise"; and "A slave is not greater than his Master."

In his book A Better Freedom, singer-songwriter Michael Card notes that almost half of Jesus' parables involved slaves or slave-like characters. He also observes that Paul's favorite title for Jesus is "master" (kyrios), and "slave" (doulos) for himself.

Use of slave imagery extended into the early church. In the second century, Ignatius commenced several of his letters, "I salute the bishop, the presbytery, and my fellow slaves."

But didn't Jesus call his followers "friends" (John 15:15)? And didn't he encourage them to address God as "Abba" (Matt. 6:9)? Indeed he did. But family imagery is not the only descriptor of divine-human relationships that Jesus uses.

Imagine a four-part choir in which sopranos sing of an almighty Creator, altos, of a heavenly Father, tenors, of an incarnated Friend, and basses, of a divine Master. Together the voices create a balanced chorale. Each is true. Each is needed. While believers in the West revel in the soprano ("Creator"), alto ("Father"), and tenor ("Friend") voices, we are mostly tone-deaf to the bass ("Master") voice. That's why we miss the beauty and truth of Luke 17.

We might also object because of Paul's teaching in Galatians: In Christ, there is "neither slave nor free" (3:28). Doesn't this text undercut the logic of the parable?

On closer reading, however, we see that Paul is referring to human relations, not divine-human relations. While the former is wonderfully egalitarian, we must never import an egalitarian spirit into our relationship with God. He is the Lord of the universe; we are not. He is transcendent; we are not. He is perfect; we are not.

Surrendered

If we read Jesus' parable on its own terms, we glean three insights on how to follow him.

First, we must cede control. Submission, obedience, and dependence are central to the parable's vision of discipleship. Reared on a diet of rights and entitlements, we unwittingly expect God to cater to our needs. But God owes us nothing. We owe him everything.

Because our master is all powerful, we can lean on his strength. And because he is all good, we can trust him to care for us. Our bondage is really our freedom.

Thankfully, our heavenly master is nothing like the parable's human master. Whereas the latter is selfish, the former is "gentle" and "humble in heart," giving "rest to [our] souls." His "yoke is easy" and his "burden is light" (Matt. 11:29–30).

Herein lays a great paradox as well as the key to the parable. Because our master is all powerful, we can lean on his strength. And because he is all good, we can trust him to care for us. Our bondage is really our freedom.

Every three years, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship hosts Urbana, a large missions conference, in St. Louis. As 16,000 college students crowded into the Rams football stadium for Urbana 2009, leaders learned that the main waterline outside the Edward Jones Dome had burst. We were told repairs could take ten hours—or three days. If the latter, the fire marshal would have to shut down the conference.

For four long hours, the outcome hung in the balance. A type A personality, I wanted to run around panicked. Rather, to my surprise, I remained calm. Why? Because I had been learning that being the slave of a good and powerful master has its privileges. I had performed all of my duties, done everything I was supposed to do. And my master was in control.

Another Urbana story: In 1967, a student named Libby attended with her boyfriend, Tom. During the final commitment evening, both submitted their lives to the Lord. For 30 years, Tom and Libby Little served in Afghanistan, providing vision care to the people of Kabul throughout seemingly endless wars and conflict.

In August 2010, shortly after conducting a two-week medical camp in a remote valley of northwestern Afghanistan, Tom and his medical team were ambushed and killed. Upon receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her husband, Libby said, "Although Tom was killed in 2010, he had already surrendered his life to God's good purposes way back in 1967." For four decades, Tom had submitted himself to his divine master.

Second, we must do our duty. In some cases, such as caring for an elderly parent or a sick child, we need to be faithfully persistent. My mom, a single parent earning barely $5,000 a year, sacrificed for her three sons, sending each of us to the Seattle preparatory school that Bill Gates attended.

At other times, duty is thrust upon us. When Martin Luther King Jr. was 26, fellow clergy urged him to lead the Birmingham bus boycott. After agreeing to do so, he received regular death threats. Late one night, a caller threatened to bomb his house and kill him, his wife, and their infant daughter.

As King prayed past midnight, he heard: "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world." He said, "I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on."

King went to bed peacefully, no longer worried about death. That night changed his life. That night he accepted his duty. Whatever the cost might be to him or his family, he would be faithful to his calling.

During the 1940–45 Nazi occupation of France, the small Huguenot (Protestant) village of Le Chambon accepted a most difficult duty. As recounted by Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the hamlet of 3,000 farmers and artisans risked their lives to help 5,000 Jewish children escape to nearby Switzerland. When later asked why they had jeopardized so much to save strangers, their response was simple: They could not stand by and watch the innocent die. It was their God-given duty to resist evil and do good.

Disciples who see themselves as slaves do what their master commands. Ours is not to question the cost, the inconvenience, or the risk. Rather, ours is to hear the Master, delineate his imperatives, and perform them. Without theological training or advanced degrees, the people of Le Chambon understood this and acted accordingly.

Third, we remember we serve only one master. At age 26, Ken Elzinga joined the faculty of the University of Virginia. After a tenured colleague warned him that being explicit about his faith would hinder his career, Elzinga was stunned to see a flier with his face on it placed at a prominent campus location. A campus ministry had posted it to advertise a talk he had agreed to give.

A relatively new believer, Elzinga worried. Would fellow professors think less of him? Might this harm his tenure chances? He experienced a dark night of the soul, returning to campus and secretly taking the poster down.

But the next morning, Elzinga put the poster back up. After hours of soul-searching, he concluded that his life was not about career ambition but about faithful discipleship, and that being private about his faith was not an option.

In the four decades since, Elzinga has been named professor of the year multiple times and is still a speaker in high demand. He will be the first to say that serving only one master has been liberating. Why? Because pleasing an audience of one makes us less anxious, less sensitive to criticism, and more courageous. Because in doing so, we become more secure and compete less for our honor.

Consulting the Master

How has the forgotten parable of Luke 17 shaped my life? As president of a large ministry, I have faced disagreement with some of my decisions. I have also felt the sting of criticism from the academy for our adherence to biblical standards of truth, holiness, and the exclusivity of Christ. And, perhaps most painfully, I have suffered at the words of Christian bloggers.

I've been liberated, however, when I remember I serve one master. When criticized, I first ask if he is pleased with what I'm doing. After an often uncomfortable time of self-reflection—plucking a log out of one's eye is never pleasant—I can move on with confidence.

When we serve the divine Master, we are freed from meeting others' expectations. For people pleasers like me, this is a gift. When we think of ourselves as slaves to only one master, we can serve him and others with faith and joy. And at just the moment when we American Christians feel ourselves hemmed in by the cost of ceding control and letting go of entitlements, we find ourselves most liberated.

Alec Hill is president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2014 issue of Christianity Today as "The Most Troubling Parable".

Pastors

Wednesday Link List: Modern Equivalent of Baal Worship, ‘Praying in Public’ Discount, and The Shut Up, Devil! App.

Paul Wilkinson

It’s fun to read the L-I-N-K

Leadership Journal August 13, 2014

Time to dust off the flannel graph, test the cassette deck, and warm up the filmstrip projector as another season of ministry kicks off.

Paul Wilkinson blogs at Thinking Out Loud and edits Christianity 201, the latter of which is always looking for submissions.

Is Religious Journalism Haunted?

Alissa Wilkinson

Cracks in the myth of objectivity.

Books & Culture August 13, 2014

Traditional journalism supposed a writer who could stand apart from her subject, observe it, investigate it, and write down those observations for others, all while disregarding her own personal biases and remaining unaffected by the experience. The resulting work was free of emotions, passions, ideologies, or beliefs. The journalist in fact barely even has beliefs, or at least not publicly. She embodies the secular ideal: free of bias, open to everything that is logical and factual and verifiable.

Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief

Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief

Jeff Sharlet (Editor)

408 pages

$25.98

This convenient fiction reflects well on us as readers, too, which might be one reason we continue to believe it. The reader who leisurely peruses the morning paper over coffee (or hurriedly scans it in the subway) might also imagine he is measuredly reading both sides of the story and making up his own mind about the issues of the day, while still remaining fair-minded and intellectually honest.

This is a holdover from an earlier time, before postmodernism scraped away the veener of objectivity. Journalists are people, too. Like everyone, they are subject to bias, conscious or not. Academic journalism itself has grown suspicious of the objectivity myth. But it's still appealing, because it makes us feel civilized. An objective journalism would quiet the notion that things like beliefs have to color how we look at the world. It would prove that it is possible to fence in a "secular" public square, one in which religion and bias are checked at the door.

In his introduction to Radiant Truths, Jeff Sharlet goes further: he writes that the very idea—"the belief that it is possible to stand apart from the world—cuts close to the more obviously religious doctrine of infallibility" (14), which is to say that even this belief in a non-sectarian secular space is its own sort of religion, something based more on faith than empirically verifiable fact, something that is profoundly identity-shaping for its believers. In this volume, Sharlet, a self-described skeptic who is a bestselling literary journalist and a professor of creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College, pulls together a valuable trove of the best of the genre that helped break down conventional journalism's claims: literary journalism, and, specifically, reporting on American religion, ranging over the past century and a half. Well-known multi-genre writers (Henry David Thoreau, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin) appear alongside more niche practitioners (Meridel Le Sueur, Ellen Willis), with work that covers a stylistic range from the clinical to the barn-burning.

Literary journalism crops up in the mid-nineteenth century—the collection begins with Walt Whitman in 1863—but doesn't get a toehold on the American journalistic landscape until the mid-twentieth century, when practitioners like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer made their careers writing it.

Novelists flock to the genre, since its techniques are closely related: nearly all of David Foster Wallace's nonfiction is literary journalism; Zadie Smith has done her fair share. You can read literary journalism in many vaunted publications, from books and elder statesmen like The New Yorker and Harper's to upstarts: n+1, The Believer, websites that come and go. The public radio show This American Life functionally practices the genre in radio form and launched a revolution in radio. Literary journalism appears in major newspapers and magazines alongside traditional reporting, too—Ta-Nehisi Coates's much-buzzed-about 2014 article on reparations in The Atlantic qualifies; The New York Times Magazine frequently publishes long-form literary journalism by important young writers like John Jeremiah Sullivan.

All of this is part of a wider shift toward what the academy calls "creative nonfiction," a genre that also encompasses memoir, personal essay, some forms of criticism, and other less definable works. That is a messy, confusing family, but all creative nonfiction has a couple things in common: a noticeable narrator who has made choices to enter and shape the story (and often uses the first-person pronoun), and a story is built out of things that happened in the same universe the reader occupies. Nearly everything else is up for grabs.

As part of this tradition, writers of literary journalism are cognizant of their own participation in their stories, as well as the power they hold to shape the reader's perceptions of their subjects. It's difficult to be even-handed in covering things that often, frankly, test the limits of the writer's credulity. So necessary is the continued suspension of judgment that the writer sometimes finds himself adrift, not sure what even he believes anymore. In Radiant Truths, Sharlet "looked for pieces that 'essay' these contradictions, true tales that recognize that the wrinkle in any truth is always the truth teller herself, essays that attempt to become documents and take stock of their failures to completely do so as an inevitable part of the story" (6). He is convinced that literary journalism is "uniquely well suited to the documentation and representation of the strange category of American religion" (9).

That is because literary journalism (like all creative nonfiction) is a genre of border-crossing, in which the individual writer enters a world and writes as both part of it and as the other. It requires the writer (in Charles Taylor's terms) to maintain a bounded and a porous self at the same time—not too easily drawn in, but also open to the idea that something beyond the material world is going on before her eyes. Good literary journalism requires walking a very thin rail between both skepticism and empathy. The writer can't reflexively sneer at his subject, but he can't be swept away, either. Sharlet himself knows that it's a very live possibility—in the essay "Heartland, Kansas," which Sharlet and Peter Manseau wrote about the Fort Riley Dark Moon Coven Association, they find themselves participating in the rituals, too: "A couple of skeptics made to dance like holy fools. If that wasn't magick, it was a hell of a trick" (346).

Radiant Truths defines the word "religion" broadly enough to encompass not just traditional forms of institutionalized belief, but the more nebulous, amorphic, individualized spirituality that seems to thrive in the swampy pluralism that is America, a country that both prides itself on its root in the rationalist Enlightenment and its institutionalized heritage of religious freedom. When this strange hybrid form of literary journalism focuses its attention on religion, it turns out, it's a perfect match—as Sharlet puts it, "the impossibility of perfect representation of reality, visible and otherwise—makes literary journalism uniquely suited for the subject of American religion, so often struggling to be one or the other, pious or democratic, communal or individual, rooted or transcendent" (15).

Which is all to say that literary religion journalism is, itself, a post-secular genre. It operates mostly outside any plausibility structures guided by one particular faith, but it also does not actively reject religion or ignore the existence of things beyond the writer. It does not presume that a "scientific" approach to the world—one which deals only in empirically verifiable "realities"—is the legitimate one for grown-ups, while considering religion as a nice hobby for some people to mess around with at home on the weekends. In its rigorous examination of the world, it slips past what we touch and see. When its practitioner is doing her job, this writing is frightening, mysterious, and unnerving.

One gets the keen sense, from Sharlet's collection, that the best literary journalist is a doubter who wants to believe: the bounded rational skeptic whose heart betrays him at unexpected moments. This crops up over and over, particularly in the later essays in the book. In "Upon This Rock" (by my lights, one of the best creative nonfiction essays ever written), John Jeremiah Sullivan recounts his trip to the massive Creation music festival, where he expects to write up a cheeky bit of reporting for Rolling Stone but winds up encountering his own past in an evangelical youth group. Dennis Covington travels to West Virginia to write about snake handlers, and winds up handling. Ellen Willis goes to live among the Orthodox in Israel, where her brother has converted, to figure out why modern, progressive, educated people would join such a restrictive, seemingly backwards world; she is simultaneously attracted and repelled. Barbara Grizzutti Harrison, a Catholic who has some beef with the church, reports on World Youth Day in Denver and finds herself vacillating between appreciative and frustrated. Wiccans and occult lore, romantic naturalism and mystical voodoo, reform preachers and the Amish—all get a fair shake in this anthology, accompanied by Sharlet's incisive introductions.

The harshest criticism is reserved for American Protestantism by Gary Wills, who visits Richard Nixon's hometown and unpacks the sort of mainline therapeutic deism in vogue at the time. It comes in for criticism precisely because it is not a religion that asks its adherents to open themselves to the possibility of the divine. After attending a Sunday morning service, Wills notes, "the congregation had not been summoned to accept Christ, but to accept itself. To accept itself accepting a world of sunny disorientation. The milky white center is reserved in these windows because they, the people, America's large blank center, are the object of their own cult" (206). In other words, the most problematic religion is one that eschews transcendence and finds its center in its adherents—according to Wills, it turns each one into his own self-made man, the "true American monster" (214).

Yet the mythology of conventional journalism gave its readers reason to believe they could do just that: live an intelligent life, ignore the possibility of forces beyond themselves, and construct a progressive public square in which objectivity ruled and religion was relegated to something you did for fun when you went home. Literary journalism, by contrast—which Sharlet calls "the hybrid genre, the monster genre—half-report, half-story, half-ethnography, half-magic" (134)—fires back that no, there is no way for a world freed from religion to exist. Religion, or the search for something beyond ourselves, is not something we construct and toss away at will. It is rooted deep in us. It works on us in unexpected ways. It leaves us questioning our own powers of reasoning. It can leave us speechless in the face of the unexplainable.

And it does it by forcing its writers, and therefore its readers, into an encounter that demands we loosen up our boundaries just a little—first to each other, and then to the mysteries that we believe in. Sharlet never comes out and says it, but he implicitly suggests in this collection that the porosity required of the writer, and then reader, of literary journalism may actually teach us how to wander toward a more robust pluralism, one that both requires the (always tenuous) acceptance of a multiplicity of beliefs and strikes a balance between the bounded and the porous: openness to others, while maintenaning one's own firmly-rooted perspective. Such a pluralism chips away at the secularism myth. And it gives us a lot of great journalism, too.

Alissa Wilkinson is assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City and Christianity Today's chief film critic. This article will be published in the Fall 2014 issue of Comment Magazine, forthcoming. www.cardus.ca/comment. Reprinted with permission

Copyright © 2014 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

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