by | Aug 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
On June 25, 2024, Eastern Nazarene College announced that it will close at the end of the year. I specify the date because it matters: The news came well after faculty members had begun planning syllabi and courses for the fall semester. To say this was a bombshell for them and their students is an understatement. Six months’ notice might be long in other contexts, but in academia, it’s scandalously brief.
This story is not unique among Christian colleges, and it raises an increasingly pressing question: What does it look like to navigate closures ethically and compassionately?
Christian institutions should be particularly committed to shutting down or downsizing in a way that treats faculty, staff, and students with love. Ending things well is an essential part of bearing witness and displaying good fruit for Christian colleges and universities, but, unfortunately, Eastern Nazarene’s behavior is far from exceptional.
Last summer, for example, conflicting announcements were coming out of The King’s College in New York City. The school laid off a number of faculty and ultimately canceled all fall classes, yet its board refused to take the final step to closure. It’s easy to imagine why they hesitated, but this proved to be a heartbreaking approach that raised warrantless hopes and left scholars scrambling to find new work.
The last few years have also seen closures by Christian institutions including programs at Trinity International University, Alliance University (formerly Nyack College), Goddard College, and Clarks Summit University. Even longer is the list of institutions, like Cornerstone University, that haven’t closed yet have ruthlessly cut programs, often in the humanities, in a desperate attempt to reinvent themselves and remain afloat. Some of the institutions on both lists have been struggling for years, and, in many cases, the pandemic accelerated their troubles.
This is all depressing, especially if you are a professor or a student or one of the alumni of the affected institutions—oran ex-professor like me. CT’s Emily Belz recently highlighted the challenge involved in records keeping for alumni of shuttered institutions. But what we’re seeing now is only the beginning; we should expect much more of these closures over the decade to come.
The single biggest reason for this is not unique to Christian schools. It’s the long-predicted “demographic cliff.” US birthrates dropped to an all-time low during the Great Recession and never bounced back. Next year, in 2025, we’ll be 18 years past that initial plunge, and our national birthrate remains below replacement level.
All things being equal, this means that every year for the foreseeable future, the entering freshman class in colleges nationwide will decline. Harvard will probably be just fine. Tiny Christian colleges without a national reputation, not so much. Even Wheaton College, the “evangelical Harvard,” had to make adjustments for this reality in late 2022.
Going forward, nearly all Christian colleges will have to plan to shrink, merge, or close. These difficult choices will be unavoidable and necessary. But, to get back to the question I posed at the outset, how college leadership approaches these decisions matters, and how Christian college leadership does it should be recognizably shaped by Christian ethics.
The biggest part of that how is when. The boards and other leadership of schools headed for cuts and closure must give faculty and staff the earliest possible notice that job loss is a possibility. For faculty, I’d argue that one year’s advance notice is the minimum that compassion requires.
True, in many other workplaces, a two-week notice is customary and sufficient. But higher education works differently because of its quirky annual hiring cycle. With very few exceptions, academic jobs are posted in the fall and early spring. Hires are concluded by late spring, and new positions begin in August. That means faculty need at least a full school year to have any chance of continuing to work in their field—not to mention to place a house on the market or finish out a lease and make plans for required relocation without losing a lot of money in the process.
There’s an obvious counterargument that can be made to such early advance notice of potential closure: It will prompt faculty to leave early, and such a loss of talent in short order could only make things worse for the institution’s reputation and fate. Maybe keeping quiet would buy leadership time to work behind the scenes to resolve the crisis.
But this counterargument ignores how university budgets work. Colleges typically set their budgets at least two years in advance, which means leadership likely knows closure is coming a year or more ahead of time. At that point, a miracle in the form of a massive influx of major donations is possible, perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Keeping quiet almost certainly can’t save the school—and certainly can’t justify playing with people’s lives (or, at least, their livelihoods).
Faculty layoffs at Cornerstone University, also this past June, were reportedly even worse by this measure of timeliness and transparency: “Several former Cornerstone faculty told [Religion News Service] that all six of those who left were tenured and had already signed contracts for the forthcoming school year when they were informed in June that their roles were being ended—likely too late to be able to obtain a similar spot elsewhere.” Even one year out of academia can be career-ending in our dismal higher-ed job market, so those lost jobs may well be these faculty members’ last university roles.
This timing is also devastating for students. Sure, some will transfer to other colleges—there are plenty out there, in this climate, that are eager to welcome more students, and closing schools, including Eastern Nazarene, have arranged transfer agreements with comparable institutions. But in practice, just over half of students who go through college closures never re-enroll. They’re probably demoralized and in debt and definitely left without a degree.
College and program closures affect real people, disrupting their lives and plans, and the shorter the notice, the more extreme the disruption. Christian university boards and administrators owe their employees and students more honesty and love.
In theory, of course, financial information about all private Christian schools is public per IRS rules. Institutional leadership might want to claim this absolves them from the charge of covering up dire financial straits. But the repeated shock that faculty and students express whenever they learn that their beloved institution is closing shows that they are not in the habit of looking up those forms on their own. Of course, why should they? That is not their duty.
If institutions that need to re-evaluate their finances in the future need a model, Wheaton has showed what it looks like to communicate genuine compassion for faculty, staff, and students. Two years ago, the college announced “a reduction of approximately 10 percent of the academic division, which includes faculty and academic staff, over the next three years to avoid a projected financial deficit.”
The striking part was the timing: “Ten faculty members, about 5 percent of the college’s 213 tenured, tenure-track faculty and permanent lecturers, were notified that their positions would end in June 2024 or June 2025.” The announcement was made on November 17, 2022, giving affected faculty notice of at least a year and a half.
That good practice needn’t be unusual. Considering how far ahead universities make budget projections, this kind of timeline is realistic for other institutions facing serious financial constraints. Furthermore, Wheaton’s case shows that such transparency need not result in a damaging loss of talent.
As we say about parenting, so much of faith and ethics are “caught, not taught.” Christian witness in difficult situations matters immensely, and in an age when we so often hear of cruel and unethical leadership, Christian college leaders could stand apart. Compassion may not keep college doors open, but it will make a difference in the lives of God’s image-bearers.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
The post More Christian Colleges Will Close. Can They Finish Well? appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Aug 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
Next week’s Labor Day holiday honors the contributions workers make to society and celebrates the power and goodness of human work. But the historical roots of the holiday—which is grounded in advocacy against horrific working conditions, including those faced by child laborers—reminds us that work can also be awful.
Recent research bears witness to both sides of this reality. Studies demonstrate how employment makes a significant contribution to well-being in ways that go beyond our paychecks. “The pain caused by the experience of unemployment is one of the best-documented findings in all happiness research,” yet one recent study argues that pain essentially disappears when a person finds a new job. Clearly, work is good for you!
Except when it isn’t. Job quality also has a very significant effect on a person’s sense of well-being. Bad work can make life miserable and contribute to poor physical and mental health, as several studies suggest workers who “have little opportunity to use their skills” or influence decisions have significantly higher risks of back pain and heart disease.
And just like those early promoters of Labor Day recognized, workers are often exploited or excluded. Job applications with “Black” names still get far fewer callbacks from potential employers than do the exact same applications with “white” names. American companies steal billions of dollars from workers annually through “wage theft.” Low-wage workers saw the purchasing power of their wages decline from 1979 to 2013, even as the market grew 706 percent and average CEO pay grew by over 1,000 percent.
Despite the massive impact work has on our lives, American Christians haven’t always been good at prioritizing work in our discipleship. Amy Sherman cites research that shows less than 10 percent of regular churchgoers remember their pastor preaching on work. The “faith and work” movement has done enormous good in trying to get the workplace back on the church’s discipleship agenda, while Christians passionate about justice have emphasized the need to confront economic injustice.
Nevertheless, we still often struggle to hold together both the powerful possibilities and deeply dysfunctional realities of work in our world. So, this Labor Day, perhaps it can help to revisit the Book of Exodus—which offers three glimpses of the promises and perils of work.
First, Exodus forces us to wrestle with the ugly reality of work that exploits. It all begins when Pharaoh becomes disturbed at how many Israelites he’s seeing around town. His response to this perceived problem offers us a masterclass in xenophobia and economic oppression. Pharaoh’s first step is to stir up fear of the Israelites’ otherness, essentially saying, “Since they’re not like us, they’re not really on our side!”:
[Pharaoh] said to his people, “The Israelite people are now larger in number and stronger than we are. Come on, let’s be smart and deal with them. Otherwise, they will only grow in number. And if war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and then escape from the land.” (1:9–10, CEB)
By sowing seeds of anti-immigrant fear, Pharaoh paves the way for a particularly appealing solution. The Egyptians will simultaneously subdue and profit off the Israelites, forcing them to do hard labor and build “storage cities” for Pharaoh. Such backbreaking work expands Egypt’s ability to acquire more and more.
This exploitation provides the background for the most famous scenes in Exodus, when the Lord hears the groans of his oppressed people in their toil and comes down to confront Pharaoh. God demands that the Israelites be released from “working” for their Egyptian overlord so they can come and “work” for God (the Hebrew word translated as worship in passages like Ex. 4:23 is the Hebrew word for “work” or “service”).
And when Pharaoh refuses, God liberates his oppressed employees, dismantling Pharoah’s military and economic power in the process.
There’s no doubt Pharaoh managed to get a lot done during his time as an Israelite employer. But God hates unjust gain. In Exodus, the creator of the universe looks past the grandeur of Pharaoh’s Egypt to see a people nearly broken. The King of Kings hears the cries of oppressed workers, even over the endless noise of Pharaoh’s propaganda machine. The Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, takes his stand against Egypt’s ruler and his oppressive workplace.
God then takes those liberated people into the wilderness and offers them a beautiful vision for life as coworkers with him. In fact, God gives Israel’s leader, Moses, a blueprint for a major initiative that will require the whole community to pitch in. Shockingly, just as Moses is receiving instructions for this new effort, the Israelites decide to take on a project of their own.
Their disastrous decision offers us Exodus’s second window into the workplace: Sometimes, our work can be idolatrous.
While Moses is on the mountain with God, the people create the famous golden calf, an idol designed to represent the divine power that brought Israel up out of Egypt (32:4). Like allidols, the golden calf claimed some of the love, trust, and service the Israelites owed the Lord. Walter Moberly famously argued that this betrayal is the equivalent of cheating on your spouse on the first night of your honeymoon. But it’s also a workplace revolt; having been liberated from their oppressive Egyptian employers, the Israelites set up an idolatrous workshop of their own.
Creating the golden calf requires a great deal of sacrifice and collaboration. All the people “invest” in Golden Calf Enterprises by giving Aaron gold earrings as raw materials. While Exodus describes Aaron as “making” the golden calf, it seems reasonable that others pitched in as well. Their creativity and collaboration presumably created something beautiful, at least in the eyes of the craftspeople who built it together.
When the Lord smashed Egypt’s exploitative workplaces, the Israelites rejoiced. But in the wilderness, they discover this God will also destroy the idols they were so proud to create and so prone to worship. When he does so, those who clingto such shiny idols risk destruction as well (32:35).
But there’s a third act in Exodus’s workplace drama. In an act of outrageous grace, God forgives the people andrehires them for a special job: the building of the tabernacle. This beautiful tent serves as the Lord’s mobile home, allowing God to go on pilgrimage with his people (25:8).
The tabernacle is both God’s royal throne room and a Garden of Eden–inspired glimpse of creation as the Creator intended the world to be. Israel’s work on the tabernacle, then, facilitates God’s royal presence in their midst and offers the community a glimpse of God’s new creation.This tabernacle project is kingdom-oriented work. It creates a tangible glimpse of God’s generous presence, reign, and way in a broken world. Now, that’swork worth doing!
But they can’t do this work on their own. God gives Moses guidance for how to build the tabernacle (25:9). He also gives Spirit-inspired wisdom and skill to craftspeople like Bezalel and Oholiab so they can work creatively and collaboratively with the entire community (31:1–6). Together, they build this beautiful yet simple glimpse of heaven on earth (36:2–7). And then, in response to their Spirit-enabled work, the Lord takes up residence in the home his people have made for him.
These three types of work—exploitative, idolatrous, and kingdom-oriented—can help us think about workplace discipleship today.
Exodus reminds us that the workplace is often a place where people are exploited, not least when they manifest the kind of overwhelming imbalances of power or ethnic discrimination that we see in Exodus 1. Just as the Lord criticized and confronted exploitative labor back then, God’s people must do the same today. Disciples who serve the God of the Exodus must learn to sniff out and confront such injustice wherever it exists—whether in their own workplaces or through public advocacy and political action on behalf of workers more broadly.
But if we want to avoid exploitative work, we’re also going to have to ask some hard questions. We’ll need to listen carefully to those for whom work does not work—including marginalized migrant workers, the working poor, and those suffering from sexual harassment or racial discrimination. We may need to consider the power imbalances reflected in the compensation structures and organizational processes of our own workplaces.
And we would do well to learn about Christians who prophetically pursued economic justice in the workplace in the past. Such leaders include Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, who helped found Mondragon, one of the world’s largest and oldest worker-owner cooperatives, currently employing 60,000 people worldwide; Cesar Chavez, whose faith-based, nonviolent labor organizing sought increased wages and better working conditions for exploited California farmworkers; and Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated during his participation in the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike demanding fair wages and safe labor conditions.
Of course, the Book of Exodus reminds us that even if our work isn’t overtly exploitative, it may well be idolatrous. The idols we make out of our work promise to deliver us, but they cannot make good on their commitments. Discipleship must train us to identify the idol-making propensity of our work, not least by reminding us that God hates our idols.
Our liturgical practices need to force us to reflect on the myriad subtle ways our work and ourworkplace might regularly create little idols for our idol-factory hearts to cling to—especially when such idol production often goes hand in hand with practices that exploit, oppress, and marginalize others for unjust gain.
Finally, Exodus invites us to embrace kingdom-oriented work. When we work in alignment with God’s purposes, collaborate with others on projects that create glimpses of the world as God designed it to be, and draw upon Spirit-given skills that allow us to make the sorts of beautiful places, services, and, dare I say it, products that echo God’s purposes for creation, our work becomes an act of worship.
As Mark Glanville puts it in his recent book, “By loving what Christ loves and challenging what Christ challenges” in our “parents’ groups, cafés, trucks, homes, factories, hospitals, and advocacy groups,” we bear witness “to the restoring reign of Christ.” We make the on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven reign of God that is on the way glimpsable to ourselves and to our neighbors.
Churches can and should embrace the kind of discipleship that prepares us to confront exploitative work, reject idolatrous work, and embrace kingdom-oriented work. Preaching on Exodus with an awareness of the book’s economic vision could be a good start!
Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson also argue that the way church services are structured can help workers bring their work-related praises, confessions, laments, requests, petitions, and gifts into corporate worship. They offer free liturgies, songs, and prayers to help you do just that at Worship for Workers. One of my favorites involves inviting congregants to decorate the Lord’s Supper table with visible signs of their own vocations.
Amy Sherman’s Kingdom Calling offers a vast array of stories and practices to help Christians discover how to exercise their “vocational power” justly and righteously through work. And Robby Holt, Brian Fikkert, and I wrote Practicing the King’s Economy in part to provide churches with discipleship tools and resources to help us bend our workplaces toward God’s kingdom. We include guidance for how Christians can create opportunities for those who most struggle to find jobs and flourish in them.
At an even simpler level, research shows that “supportive coworkers” and quality supervisors play an enormousrole in the well-being of workers. How many Christians might discover an opportunity for kingdom work simply by giving more attention to the way they love their workplace neighbor?
Exodus doesn’t offer easy or straightforward answers to all our workplace questions. Yet it does invite us into a lifelong journey of discipleship in our work lives. There are some easy wins for churches that want to get started, but fully embracing Exodus’s invitations and challenges will require a lifetime of costly, time-consuming formation. But since most Christians spend most of their waking lives at work, what area of our discipleship could possibly be more pressing?
The present moment is ripe with opportunities for us to reckon with the powerful possibilities and painful realities of work. What better time to make a start than this Labor Day?
Michael J. Rhodes is an Old Testament lecturer at Carey Baptist College, the author of Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World, and coauthor of Practicing the King’s Economy.
The post Choose This (Labor) Day Whom You Will Serve appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Aug 28, 2024 | Uncategorized
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Not long ago, a woman told me about a conflict she was having with a fellow member of her church. Conflict might be the wrong word, since it seemed mostly one-sided. The woman said that the other church member was telling falsehoods about her in hallway conversations and social media groups.
“You seem to mostly ignore it when people lie about you,” the woman said to me. “Is that because it would be wrong for me to defend myself? Should I just ignore what they say about me?”
Part of the problem with answering this question is that we often think wrongly about what it means to “ignore.” Ignoring something sounds, by definition, passive—it is, literally, not to know and thus not to respond. And yet, ignorance—rightly defined—is active. In order to ignore well, we have to know well. That’s perhaps the biggest obstacle to making the decision to ignore or to engage.
Responding to slander about oneself is biblically complicated in a way that some other questions—say, “Should I have an affair?” or “Should I embezzle from my company?” —are not. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself,” the Bible says in one verse (Prov. 26:4, ESV throughout). And then the very next verse says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” This isn’t a contradiction. There are times when responding is the right thing to do, and times when it’s the wrong thing.
Morality is not the compilation of data but conformity to a Person. The example of Jesus is complicated too because, as the wisdom of God, Jesus could see perfectly what we see imperfectly—which situations call for a Proverbs 26:4 ignoring and which call for a Proverbs 26:5 engaging.
When it comes to slander about himself, Jesus sometimes directly contradicted untruth (John 5:19–46). Sometimes, he responded not with a defense of himself but by asking questions or telling stories that revealed the underlying motives (Luke 14:1–6). Quite often, he simply ignored what was said about him altogether (Mark 11:33). At least once, he even ridiculed the slander (Luke 7:28–34).
In all those contexts, though, Jesus modeled what it means to avoid the warning of Proverbs, that is, to avoid sinning in response to sins against us. He said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well” (Matt. 5:38–40).
The apostle Peter commands us to be less concerned about what people say about us than about what we actually are. “If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you,” he wrote. “But let none of you suffer as a murder or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler” (1 Pet. 4:14–15).
That requires a knowing of your own vulnerabilities. My church-slandered conversation partner noted that I usually ignore untrue things said about me, but she probably overestimated how much I even know about them. I don’t search my name or look at tagged replies from people I don’t follow on social media. That’s not because I think people are wrong to do that but because I know myself; if I paid attention to that stuff, I would be distracted. I couldn’t do what God has called me to do.
The woman I was talking to might be different. But if you have a tendency for quarrelsomeness or an oversensitivity to other people’s approval, you might be best served not just by ignoring slander but by trying to avoid, so much as is possible with you, knowing about it altogether. If you can’t respond to slander without retaliation or revenge, don’t do it.
This also requires knowing the situation. Jesus treated people who were genuinely confused by misinformation (John 1:45–51) differently from those who were seeking to, as Matthew put it, “entangle him in his words” (Matt. 22:15–22). Many of the people I know who exert time and energy “correcting the record” about themselves often don’t recognize the reasons behind why the lies are told about them.
Sometimes it’s genuine misinformation—in which case, confronting the lie with the truth might be the right thing to do. In many cases, though, the problem is not that the truth isn’t available but rather that it isn’t useful. In such cases, people are trying to build a “platform” for themselves by making inflammatory statements about someone other people in their world know. To respond to that makes as much sense as Jodie Foster responding to John Hinckley shooting a president to get her attention.
There are sometimes quite different principles involved in defending others from slander than in defending oneself. Joseph forgiving his brothers for their injustice (Gen. 50:19–21) is commendable. If he had waved away their mistreatment of others, though, that would have been unjust. Generally speaking, the principles of Proverbs 27:2—“Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips”—often can be applied to the question of responding to lies about oneself.
When someone’s lying about you, lean in the direction of ignoring it, unless obviously not applicable. When it comes to lies about someone else, do the reverse. To silently pass by while someone tells what you know to be lies about your neighbor is to get on the wrong side of Jesus’ parable of the beaten man and the Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). Jesus waved off a lot of slander about himself, but he didn’t stand for it when it was directed toward, for instance, the man he healed from blindness (John 9:1–5).
The first-century church at Smyrna suffered slander from all directions: Their home religious community disowned them. The Roman Empire labeled them as seditious and erosive of national character. Jesus told them he knew about the slander, that it would get worse, but that what it means to overcome is a matter of his judgment seat, not the judgment of everyone else (Rev. 2:8–11).
The woman who asked me how—or whether—to respond to lies about her needs to know, above all, that Jesus knows the difference between the truth and lies; he is the difference between truth and lies. When deciding whether to correct the record or to remain silent and entrust yourself to God, seek to know yourself and your situation—but, most of all, seek to know him.
Sometimes a response is right. But more often than you might think, ignorance is blessed.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
The post When to Respond to Slander (and When to Ignore It) appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Aug 27, 2024 | Uncategorized
There is a beautiful garden in perfect bloom, existing somewhere outside of time and place. There, four pagan gods have gathered together for an intense, six-day Platonic symposium about the nature of the mind and the spiritual world (after which they will rest on the seventh day).
This in a nutshell is the setting and the organizational premise, old and new all at once, of David Bentley Hart’s new book, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, explores the philosophy and theology of the mind in a manner that delights, bewilders, confuses, and alarms—sometimes separately and sometimes all at once.
The Archaic Greek philosopher Thales once said, “All things are full of gods.” For Thales, this notion was perfectly compatible with his scientific inquiry into astronomy, mathematics, and more.
The nod to Thales in the book’s title is appropriate. As Hart notes in his introduction in a sentence whose intimidatingly elaborate erudition—and sheer length—captures the style of his prose throughout:
Before the advent and eventual triumph of the mechanical philosophy in early modernity, and then the gradual but more or less total triumph of a materialist metaphysics of nature (even among those who believe in a realm beyond the merely physical), most developed philosophies, East and West alike, presumed that mind or something mindlike, transcendent or immanent or both, was the more original truth of things, pervading, sustaining, and giving existence to all that is.
As Hart recognizes, embracing the supremacy of the mind in all its mysterious glory doesn’t necessarily entail any new theological or philosophical discoveries. Instead, it involves dusting off and recovering something very old—pre-Christian, even. The idea of miracles, the acceptance of supernatural realities, and the need for mediators between gods and normal humans have all been features of human life and belief for millennia.
The Realest Reality
Michael Horton’s new book, Shaman and Sage, which I coincidentally read right before picking up Hart’s volume, is a good companion piece here, as it confirms the longstanding human bend toward the spiritual (but not necessarily religious). Indeed, the extreme contemporary skeptics, so quick to dismiss the reality of anything intangible or invisible, belong squarely in the historical minority. For much of human existence, people were more Thales than Richard Dawkins—seeing no conflict between the world of science and the mysterious unseen all around.
The spiritual state, then, seems to occur more or less naturally. By the end of Hart’s book, nevertheless, I felt that I could best relate to Hephaestus, the pagan metalsmith god Hart casts as the supporter of the material world. Hephaestus’s main conversationalist is Psyche, the goddess of the soul—that is, indeed, what her name literally means. (Also present at Hart’s imagined dialogue but less outspoken are Eros, the god of love and Psyche’s husband, and Hermes, the messenger god.)
It is Psyche who drives Hart’s main argument throughout this volume—that the spiritual and invisible world is true, and it is much more real than the physical and tangible world so ardently championed by modern philosophies. The argument for the latter also usually goes hand in hand with the exclusion of the divine and supernatural. Accordingly, Psyche’s journey to prove the reality of the life of the mind is inextricably connected with her axiom that the divine is everywhere.
As Hart says,
a truly scrupulous phenomenology of mental agency discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities [i.e., life, mind, and language], and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God.
But when I say that I could best relate to Hephaestus by the book’s end, I do not mean that I am wholly persuaded by his materialist stance—that has never fully appealed to me. Rather, I find that, like him, I am lost in all the arguments Psyche (or, rather, Hart) presents. To say that this book broke my brain would be an understatement.
In many ways, All Things Are Full of Gods—brain-breaking tendencies included—is classic Hart. Stunningly twisting Ciceronian sentences, of the sort I have quoted in this review, might span an entire paragraph, enticing the reader with the beauty of their phrasing. Still, it is a beauty that one cannot fully or easily comprehend, as I often realized upon reaching such a one’s end. I understand, I think, the overall premises and arguments of the book; I struggled, however, to understand many individual sentences in full. But then, as Hart notes, language too is a mystery.
The evolution of Hart’s thought and brilliance is on full display, nevertheless, as he continues his decades-long exploration of the divine across traditions, offering in All Things Are Full of Gods a recognizable sequel to such earlier books as Atheist Delusions, The Experience of God, and, to a lesser extent, That All Shall Be Saved.
Here, Hart’s meditation—for this book is more a meditation in dialogue form than any sort of traditional argument—centers around two essential premises that Psyche painstakingly tries to prove by drawing on examples from the past two and a half millennia of philosophy. First, that God and the divine or spiritual world are intensely, palpably real. Second (and most important), that the visible world is not all that there is—in fact, the things unseen are more real.
The mind is greater than the body. As Psyche puts it early in the dialogue, “Whatever the nature of matter may be, the primal reality of all things is mind.” But this idea, Hart is convinced, is not unique to any one tradition; rather, it is universal in premodernity. And so, Psyche concludes, “Ātman is Brahman—which I take to be the first, last, most fundamental, and most exalted truth of all real philosophy and religion alike.”
Such beautiful yet loaded statements are what have previously embroiled Hart in charges of heresy. For instance, he has been accused of universalism (the belief in universal salvation), a stance he seems to defend most vehemently in That All Shall Be Saved. And Hart’s new book contains more than a whiff of what others one article criticized as Hart’s “Post-Christian Pantheism.”
Drawing Protestant conclusions
What do we make of it all—the dialogue of four pagan gods about the nature of the divine, about the thinking life, and about the nature of reality and the search for wonder in the modern world? This choice of conversationalists to present Hart’s argument is certainly thought-provoking. But perhaps we overthink this remarkable project and its intended meaning if we focus entirely on the premise of four pagan gods in conversation.
Ultimately, the theme that comes through is that of mystery—a transcendent sort of question without an exact answer. What is the meaning of life, of exploration, and even of our very existence? Psyche’s informed answers to question after question from Hephaestus are kaleidoscopic, expanding into seemingly infinite worlds swirling within, but mainly lead to this conclusion: There is no clear comprehensible answer. The thinking life is wonderfully rich—or at least it can be if we leave ourselves open to endless questions, as Hart encourages.
At the end, I was left with the Protestant Sunday school question: Where is Jesus in all this? In the words of hymnwriter Fanny Crosby, we can proclaim, “Take the world, but give me Jesus”—a statement that can read as a Protestant variation on Hart’s overall argument about spiritual reality surpassing the physical.
But Hart is not a Protestant. And perhaps that is what irks his critics most. For all his brilliance, we cannot fully know Hart’s mind, and so critics guess. I will refrain. But I do know that after reading this book, I can still readily draw Protestant conclusions about the transcendent beauty of the Creator God who has made all things. While I would not agree with Thales in a literal sense—that “all things are full of gods”—I can agree with the God of Genesis through Revelation, whose Word, in Isaiah 6:3, says that “the whole earth is full of his glory.”
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.
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by | Aug 27, 2024 | Uncategorized
When the waiter brought out my long-awaited high tea that day, I didn’t expect I’d still be grieving it decades later.
I was 21 and enjoying my first “real” spring break during a debt-building week away in London. After years of devouring chaste romances set in England, I’d learned that Harrods was the best place to experience the glories of scones, clotted cream, and tiny sandwiches, all served on tiers of gleaming china and, of course, washed down with hot tea. So on my inaugural trip across the sea, it seemed only right to indulge my credit card’s largesse on a high tea at Harrods. Alone.
As I looked around the room that day, I knew I’d made a grave mistake. Not even the tender scones and decadent clotted cream could balance the bitter taste of regret. They worsened it. With each new delight, I felt more keenly the lack of someone to share my enjoyment with.
When I was doing fieldwork for my book on singleness, someone told me it might be worse to eat alone than sleep alone. Eating alone is certainly a problem for people who live by themselves. But with 21st-century work schedules, sports practices, and other structural realities, even those with seemingly “built-in” meal companions in spouses or children or roommates often dine solo too. When we do share supper, allergies and dietary restrictions can create other divides. This shift has even changed apartment and home designs as dining rooms fall out of fashion.
Sometimes, the solitude of a meal alone feels welcome. Perhaps an introvert drained by a day of meetings wants nothing more than time alone to decompress. And for some harried parents, a quiet cup of coffee—a reward for getting up before the rest of the household—might feel like a rare and precious solace.
But for Christians, the question of how and with whom we eat involves more than our own preferences. What is God’s design for our meals?
Scripture includes a surprising number of stories featuring food. To prepare for liberation from slavery, God has the Israelites eat a special Passover meal of lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs that observant Jews continue to recreate annually to this day. Jesus later reinterpreted this meal in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Jesus used food to make connections with outcasts and sinners. He made a meal to mend the rift caused by Peter’s betrayal, frying fish for breakfast on the beach. And it was only at the table that an Emmaus-bound duo finally recognized him.
Food also played a pivotal role in helping the early church grasp the extent of God’s vision for his people. As Willie James Jennings writes in his commentary on Acts, “to eat the animals that were associated with a people was to move into their space of living.”
This gives great significance to Peter’s thrice-repeated vision calling him to eat previously forbidden food. Jennings writes,
Peter is not being asked to possess as much as he is being asked to enter in, become through eating a part of something that he did not imagine himself a part of before the eating. This new eating grows out of another invitation to eat, one offered by his savior and friend: “This is my body, which is given for you.”
Not every church embodies a diversity that fully reflects the body of Christ. But to the extent we do, food provides one of the best ways to connect through our shared identity as God’s children. We all need the Eucharist’s embodied reminder of grace. Other shared meals, like post-service potlucks or coffee hours, point to both our equal dependence on God for life and the feast that awaits us in heaven.
And whether feeding the hungry and marginalized or organizing meals for the sick and weary, we acknowledge two truths: Our lives are interconnected, and what we do for the “least” in our midst touches Jesus himself. As the late Orthodox bishop David Mahaffey told me, “To me, God has given us food as a way of communion with him.”
What does all this mean for our many meals alone? Do they inherently fall short of God’s good design for sustenance?
One of my favorite things about the Bible is how much of life it contains: all kinds of people, all kinds of situations.
In the Book of 1 Kings, God sends Elijah east to Cherith, a presumably remote place where he’s instructed to hide until further notice. The author gives few details about this season, apart from the miracle of sustenance God provides against a backdrop of growing famine. Ravens, better known for taking food, bear the prophet’s meals.
Perhaps because of the birds, I’d never thought about the meals themselves as lonely. Yet Elijah must have spent day after day eating without human company. (For that matter, Adam, too would have eaten “alone” until God created Eve.)
I want to be careful not to fill in details the biblical authors did not provide. But a few things strike me about these men’s solitary meals. First, they involve an implied fellowship with God. Meals aside, the little we know of Adam and Elijah’s solitary seasons suggests a strong rapport with the Lord. Surely that extended to their meals too. In fact, perhaps they didn’t really feel alone because of his presence.
Second, both received direct provision from God—water and the ravens’ food for Elijah, fruit for Adam. Under these circumstances, I would hope both men regularly offered thanks. How often and well do we do this? Scarfing down a piece of toast while we drive or eating leftovers on the couch, it’s all too easy to dive in with scarcely a word of acknowledgment.
Lastly, it strikes me that both men ate alone during seasons of preparation. As Priscilla Shirer draws out in her study of Elijah, God used the time at Cherith to prepare Elijah for unexpected communion at Zarephath and eventual confrontation with Ahab. Adam’s meals alone occurred during a time of learning about the work God had given him and slowly coming to realize his need for human companionship. In fact, they occurred before the Fall!
So maybe our meals alone can still honor God’s design. How? Maybe we slow down to notice the sights, sounds, scents, sensations, and tastes of eating. (This can also help with anxiety and stress.) Instead of distracting ourselves with YouTube or social media, we can acknowledge and welcome God’s presence with us. And we can give sincere thanks for those who made and delivered and planted and cultivated and harvested, as well as the One who provided the rain.
And also: We should try to eat with others as often as possible.
I write this as someone who now eats many meals alone, sitting at my gate-leg dining table in the chair that faces the window. Thanks to one book interview with a Norwegian man who sometimes paid bills while he ate—and hated this—I try hard to avoid doing work during dinner. On better nights, I eat while reading or listening to a book. On worse nights, I scroll on my phone.
Not long ago, I shared a late-night bite with a friend who’d come by to get something. We almost always eat something together during visits, often my latest homemade soup. A few bites into that night’s bowl, he asked, “How was your day?”
After years of living in community, I’m now several months into only the second place I’ve rented alone in some 20 years. At my friend’s simple question, my shoulders dropped and tension melted away. Suddenly I was back at the family dinner table of my junior high and high school years.
On weekdays, we rarely ate any other meal with my dad. So he used our dinners to help all six of us connect. One by one, he went around to each of us as we shared “high” and “low” points from our day. This was one of the most emotionally formative rituals of my upbringing. It had a structured cleanup ritual (a nightly chore rotation, carefully tracked on the calendar), and clear boundaries for limited dissent from the family rules (we each got one dish from Mom’s recipe rotation that we didn’t have to eat).
Through our Friday night dinners of homemade hamburgers and French fries, we learned to celebrate the ordinary. Sometimes, our parents even splurged on a two-liter bottle of pop, though I wouldn’t make the connection to work weeks or paychecks until I became an adult myself.
Hospitality sacralizes the everyday. While apps help some find restaurant meal partners, eating at home has an extra vulnerability that deepens connections and accommodates more varied budgets. I love that another friend who lives nearby has started texting me when he’s made too many potatoes or too much chili (often leading to an impromptu meal). Other friends know they might have to clear a dining table chair or that I might serve leftovers. After months of such visits, one married friend finally invited me over for lunch at her home—our first meal there in a yearslong friendship.
Sharing food can take vulnerability and flexibility. But once you get past the initial risk or discomfort, deeper connection usually follows, and loneliness recedes.
Last summer, I briefly lived with a couple who often didn’t connect until the end of their day. Before he left for his bartending job, the husband prepped dinner in the Instant Pot and left it for his wife to eat when she came home from her work as a hairdresser. One night, he made chili; another night, fish chowder. Even when he got home late, even if she’d already eaten what he’d prepared, they often debriefed their days over additional shared food or drink.
When I moved in with the couple, they were eager to embrace communal living, but doubtful we could eat together. I cooked very differently from them, and they both had several allergies. But they often loved how my cooking smelled, and so I made a list of their restrictions so I could accommodate them. As we all settled into living together, I tried to find recipes we could all eat, or made small tweaks that worked with their diet. We ate stuffed peppers with cabbage leaves; for his birthday, I made my family’s eggless applesauce cake with gluten-free flour. By the end of my four months there, they were trying to include me in their detailed weekly meal plans.
It took compromise, for all of us. But looking back, it seems like all the times we three felt most connected involved either food or the kitchen or both. Whether any of us acknowledge it or not, God’s plan for food seems to keep reasserting itself. Perhaps that’s why Jesus most often depicted heavenly life as a massive feast, a theme John later takes up with his allusions to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Revelation ends with the promise of food restored, after all. In its final chapter, the tree of life, whose fruit caused God to banish humans from Eden, reappears (Gen. 3:22, Rev. 22:2). Only once God resumes sharing that food with humans does the Bible declare the curse no more, and God and humans so close that “they will see his face.”
Anna Broadway is the author of Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling and Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.
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