June Month-in-Review

What I've been reading

As a reminder, next Monday, on July 1^st at 3 pm EST/12 pm PST, I am hosting a conversation with Luke Burgis, author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, and A.J. Swoboda, author of The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants.

You will be welcome to join LIVE, though I imagine my Canadian readers will want to watch the recording later when it’s made available to everyone. (Happy Canada Day!)

JPM Zoom Convo: Luke Burgis and A.J. Swoboda

Time: Jul 1, 2024 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88134901983?pwd=OyEAab8u9ACh77bp7NTedVbo0DncHt.1

Meeting ID: 881 3490 1983

Passcode: 536798

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I managed some reading and writing this month, despite that it was a full season of celebration and travel. This may be thanks to my husband, who did the lion’s share of driving between Cincinnati and Montreal, Montreal and New York and Cincinnati—because why drop your kid off at summer camp when you’re on your way home from your oldest daughter’s wedding?

Normally, I write this end-of-the-month post for paid subscribers, but in this month’s spirit of collective birthday celebration (Teach Us to Want is 10!), I’m making it available to everyone. These book posts aren’t intended as book reviews, but rather as reading reflections: life, at it intersects with the page. Neither are these book posts are intended as book endorsements. I am not intending to tell you what to read but rather to share with you what I’m reading and thinking about.

Here we go for June’s reading:

A Hermeneutic of Wisdom: Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture by J.de Waal Dryden

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari

Ghosted: An American Story by Nancy French

Dayswork: A Novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I’ve been reading—and recommending—this book for months now. Even if it’s dense, it’s worth it. De Waal Dryden writes to recover an ancient approach to the Bible as a formative text, which is to say a wisdom text with discipleship goals.

This will seem a rather obvious claim except for the ample evidence that we often read the Bible badly. Many skeptics, of course, read the Bible to debunk it. They stand over the text as judge and jury. Many Christians are guilty of similar superiority. They read the Bible for soothing, not sanctification. They read it to confirm their choices, not challenge them. Even earnest and well-meaning readers of the Bible, who want truth from the text, fall into their own particular errors, according to Dryden. They imagine application, not as a primary task of reading the Bible, but as one secondary to theological instruction. Indicative, then imperative. Being, then doing. Let the text speak first of God, of his work to save humanity. Then, if there's time, we might figure out how God's word matters for the week. But this is to forget the project of salvation, de Waal Dryden argues, which is to deal with sin and restore the glory given to humanity.

As Saint Augustine wrote at the end of the 4th century, the purpose of reading the Bible is singular: to form its students and their communities into the way of love. One has not read well if one doesn't love well. If you’re wondering if I’m cooking up an essay about how this might apply to the upcoming American presidential election, you might be right. I think there are ways in which our approach to the Bible is distorted, and we can see the effects in our body politics. You can reread my February reflection on Tim Albert’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism to see just a few examples.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari

It’s no small irony that the first copy of this book, given to me by Chris Smith (who has written a series of essays on his Substack about it), was left behind in a doctor’s office. (Stolen focus, indeed.) This was after my first son stole it from my nightstand—and before another son stole the replacement copy off the very same nightstand. I am fairly sure I nearly left the book behind on another occasion, which is to say the real miracle of focus begins with keeping track of your books.

There is so much in this book that reiterates much of what know about our collective attention and the causes of its degradation. Hari gathers interesting but also familiar data and anecdotes to remind you, above all else, that Silicon Valley is making every obvious attempt to manipulate the consumer and sell their attention to the highest bidder. All this research this is set against his own story of going internet-free for three months off the coast of Maine. (Oh, please don’t get me started on how very young and male this story is.)

Three things, though, stood out to me from the book, which I did very much like despite the snide comment (see above.)

·      First, the chapter about reading as related to attention was a fascinating (and altogether depressing) look at American reading habits (chapter four). We’re reading fewer books, and we’re less frequently reading for pleasure. According to Hari’s research, in 2017, “the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone” (80). Hari spends time explaining that reading fiction is a particularly demanding form of attention, and this was the kick-in-the-pants that I have needed to read more novels. New rule of life habit: fiction before bed.

·      Second, Hari’s discussion of “Cruel Optimism” has given me better language to talk about a concept I often address in my rule of life workshops. (August workshop sign-up available here.) As we talk about habit formation in the workshop, I try to underscore that our freedom to make choices is often constrained by our environment. You may wish, for example, to be more active, but when you live in the suburbs, you’re can’t escaped the culture of the car. In terms of focus, Hari reminds us that we might want our attention back, but despite our valiant efforts, continue to feel ourselves constantly given to distraction. THIS IS BY DESIGN, Hari says. THERE IS A CORPORATE CONSPIRACY TO MAKE YOU SCROLL ENDLESSLY AND PICK UP YOUR PHONE 8 MILLION TIMES A DAY. It’s not simply that you lack self-control (though this, too, might be true). It’s also true that strong forces are at work to oppose your better desires. To suggest that you can succeed simply by making better choices is to be cruelly optimistic.

·      Finally, Hari recovered for me the value of daydreaming. Creativity happens, he argues, at the moment connections are made. He interviewed Nathan Spreng, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University, and Spreng said it this way: “Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain. It’s a new association between two things that were already there” (96). This means that creative people need regular times where they need to cultivate empty silences. They need to walk and wonder.

Ghosted: An American Story by Nancy French

I bought French’s memoir after reading her husband David French’s June 9 opinion piece, “The Day My Old Church Cancelled Me Was a Very Sad Day,” in The New York Times. French detailed a story that I was familiar with, and I was sickened: first, because the account—of French’s having finally been canceled by the PCA—details the latest in a litany of griefs suffered by the conservative political writer and his family. Second, because much of the hostility directed at French, according to his account, bears the marks of racial and political animus. Third, because I am a member of a PCA church. Yes, I’ll hope to write more about all the complicated feelings after the latest spectacle of the PCA’s General Assembly, which not only cancelled French’s panel but has now launched an investigation in the late Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling. (Apparently, time abounds for leaders in the PCA.)

I bought Nancy’s memoir and appreciated hearing more of her own story. She has written publicly about the abuse she suffered as a girl by a church leader, and her abuse, as well as the church’s negligent response to abuse in general, is a central theme in the book. I praise God that she and her family have continued to persevere in the faith and risk participation in God’s messy and marvelous family, despite the trauma (and I don’t think that’s too strong a word here) they have suffered at the hands of Christians. Russell Moore interviewed French (which is how I initially heard about the book), and it was especially touching to hear her speak with such tender love for her husband in light of her recent cancer diagnosis.

Dayswork: A Novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

I was assigned this book by an editor for an essay, and I didn’t realize at the time that Bachelder and Habel, a married couple, live in Cincinnati and teach at the University of Cincinnati. For anyone who loves to geek out on the American literati, this book is a treasure trove. The novel follows an author researching Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, and Melville’s domestic and professional tragedies are woven into the narrative of this author’s family surviving the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Narrative may be too strong a word here, given that very little actually happens to this author, her husband and two children zooming in for school.) Along with Melville, there are other writers and their falling-apart families, including Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell. (If you don’t recognize these names, you may be clueing into the fact that this novel proves most interesting to a small subset of people.)

I don’t think the novel quite succeeds in crystalizing deep insights about “marriage, mortality, and making art,” though it certainly surfaces the tensions that creatives feel between their ambition and other dimensions of life. I also found it worthwhile for its “startlingly original” and “epigrammatic” form (language from the publisher). Readers might imagine a person submerged in the work of research, writing her notes on multi-colored notecards or post-its. It’s those sentences that form the basis of this novel’s prose. Although I was annoyed by this at first (where were the paragraphs?), I came to see that the isolated islands of thought mimicked the pandemic experience, when days did not string together with any kind of coherence. Gone was the narrative structure of a week, a month, even years for those of us living in places like Toronto.

As I’m a regular patron of a local bookstore, I’m hoping to suggest an event with Bacheleder and Habel to learn more about Dayswork!