MASON KING

§ Bluey

When the family watches tv, we’re trying to make it a practice of all watching together, laughing together, and enjoying each other’s company. Carly and I have been talking about a show that we found on Disney+ called Bluey, an Australian produced cartoon about a family of blue heelers: Mum, Dad, Bingo and Bluey.

Here’s the thing – the show is really good. The family laughs, plays, and treats each other with kindness, dignity, and respect—which are three foundational words in our home. The creators have said, “The main thing we want to do is not go for a cheap joke…there is definitely slapstick humor in the show, but never at the expensive of the characters. We are really trying to keep the integrity of ‘this is what your parents are like’ and ‘this is what you are really like.”

While making dinner recently I was trying to describe a scene that I watched with the kids, and my wife put her finger on what makes the show so distinct from other things we’ve seen—it’s the dad, Bandit. “Yes!” I said, “you nailed it. It’s the dad.”

He’s an incredibly loveable and loving presence, playful and serious, tender and teasing. In loads of shows with a minimal family plot line, or an absent/oaf/inept father – Bluey presents a dad that loves his girls, owns his mistakes, apologizes to his children, takes himself less seriously, and does it all with a great accent.

Below is the scene I was trying to describe to my wife, I felt like it was the perfect representation of the joy of being out in public with young kids and having to burn time you didn’t account for. They’re picking up takeaway, but the spring rolls aren’t ready. Dad calls Mum, says they’re going to wait for them, Mum asks if he just wants to come home and Dad confidently says, no, we’re fine. It’s just five minutes.

A lot can happen in five minutes.

Here is a compilation of scenes from the season:

§ Instagram, Augustine, and the Self. 

The last few weeks I have been following the instagram account of a public speaker named Collin Kartchner who enters into middle and high schools to teach students about the danger of social media. Collin consistently shares DM’s from students at the schools he speaks at, where he pulls back the curtain on the actual cost of these free accounts: the vying for attention, exposure to pornography, and the dehumanizing effects of these technologies on young minds who are trying to form their identities as persons. Here are a few of the posts:

These middle and high schoolers are dealing with figuring themselves out in the middle of an onslaught of access, a buffet of distraction that hacks their dopamine driven desires and robs them of a shot at real life. It’s the trojan gift of progress through technology that we are offering our children, whose frontal lobes have another decade before maturity: the ability to try and have their needs met through connection on a screen.

The issue here is identity and desire. I need to know that I am loved, and I want to know that someone loves me. The core of this desire is to know that I am loved by my Maker, and the frustration of this desire is that I look for this love from the made. This ambition to be loved, devolves into, as James K.A. Smith puts it, “that our goal is to be noticed or to win, or both-we are actually lowering our sights. We are aiming low. The arc of our ambition hugs the earth, and we expect to find fulfillment from people looking at us, from beating everybody else in this competition for attention. But what happens when their attention turns away, fleeting as it is? What happens after you get the grass garland, the medal, the scholarship, the promotion? How many “likes” is enough? How many followers will make you feel valued?

What if you’re wired not to be “liked” but to be loved, and not by many but by One?” (On the Road with Augustine, p.83)

Smith’s question is the correct one. When we let micro-bursts of affirmation enter our days through  followers, likes, approval, dopamine, refresh, scroll, post, click, comments and the like, this is an addictive stream of noise in what is meant to be a quiet space: your mind before God.

If your mind is never quiet, and your heart is ever-looking for affirmation in the wrong place, you cannot know yourself. How could you? All you know is the mediated you, because to have a self is to hold space internally to differentiate yourself from the glow and the noise beckoning at your thumbs.

And how do you know yourself? Klyne Snodgrass tells us that, “you are the result of your mind, your internal self-interpreting, self-directing memory. Something internal gathers all other factors, filters them, interprets them, and uses them to direct life. Humans are the only self-interpreting animal, and identity is very much about memory. Without memory there would be no identity. But it is not just memory; identity is an internal ordering and synthesizing process framed by memory, and this internal ordering even chooses in part what will be remembered. Identity is not comprised just of all the boundaries, relations, and commitments; it is the result of our ability to think about ourselves, to be self-aware and to analyze our own thoughts and actions. At bottom identity is the internal me censoring, filtering, valuing, synthesizing, and interpreting how I stand with regard to all the realities of my life. What gets in, what gets valued as good, what is given importance and attached to, what receives commitment, what gets rejected or denied-even if true-and what has such force it cannot be ignored? What do I really care about, like, and dislike, and why? Identity is the result of the thinking me that interprets and concentrates my life and character.” (Who God Says You Are, p.19)

I find Collin’s work so interesting because these teens are all asking the same questions you and I have been trying to figure out, and we think we are doing better with it than they are because we are older. We’re not. Can you remember the strong emotions you felt during middle and high school? The sense of self that wasn’t fully formed, and that looked for meaning and acceptance in whatever you were good at or who would accept you? Can you imagine having the added social pressure of a smartphone added to that? How do you ever have the space to develop your self-interpreting, self-reflecting memory that helps makes sense of the world if you are making sense of the world through the responses of others to trivial things and you can’t sit still for five minutes without finding your phone your hand again? Endless exploration of meaningless content is idling the mind at the expense of settling the heart.

Technology is not neutral, and it offers a false story as the answer to your deepest need, which is to be loved by your Maker. Is there space in your life to be “the thinking me that interprets and concentrates my life and character”?

Later in his book, Smith says, “Late capitalism is the age in which everyone has a computer in their pocket and a gaping hole where a father should be.” (p.195)

This comes from his chapter on fatherhood, but we can easily recognize the true gaping hole is where our union with God should be, through friendship with God in Christ. Smith describes the ambition of friendship with God (which we were all made for) as “the only ambition that comes with security, with a rest from the anxiety of every other ambition. Because all other ambitions are fragile, fraught. The attention of others is fickle. Domination of others is always temporary; you can’t win forever (just ask Rocky) Attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder. To aspire to friendship with God, however, is an ambition for something you could never lose. It is to get attention from someone who sees you and knows you and will never stop loving you. In short, it’s the opposite of fickle human attention, which is temporal and temperamental. God’s attention is not predicated on your performance. You don’t have to catch God’s notice with your display. He’s not a father you have to shock in order to jar his attention away from the game, crying out, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ God’s attention is a place where you can find rest and where, ‘in the father’s lap,’ as Augustine later puts it, you don’t have to be worried about getting attention from anyone else. You can rest.” (p.88-89)

It may seem trite to say it, but you can put your phone down. Technology is not neutral, and it tells a persuasive false story. Social media is in big business to monetize your attention through the deception of meaningful connection. You live with more ambient and available noise than any point in history, and it is vital that you reclaim your self before God. You can’t keep fire in your pocket and not get burned. Affirmation won’t answer the deeper question, and it takes quiet to hear the still, small voice of God.

§ Currents

• I really enjoyed this piece from Alan Jacobs on Reading Paul. 
• My dear friend, Lore Ferguson Wilbert, just released her first book and I am so proud of her!
  Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry, made its way into the world this month. I read a portion during the writing process, and am eager to read the entire finished product. From following the release and chatter since, you should buy the book now.
• If you follow me on instagram, you might have noticed that I have a reoccuring story series entitled, Sunday Night Proverbs with (George) Herbert. It’s my way of spreading really old english proverbs into the ether of social media. Here’s a little FYI that I am starting a new series of Life Lessons from (John) Hannah, one of my favorite DTS Professors. You can look for those sometime mid to late week each week if things are manageable. Below are two examples of each.

Thanks for reading! If these are helpful, or there are topics you’d like to hear more about, head to the contact page and drop me a line.

It’s the time of year when everyone is putting out their lists of favorites. Usually these lists are bad for my book habit, and they are fun to peruse and see what people enjoyed. This year two of the books we’re using in the Training and Residency Programs were voted books of the year by Christianity Today: both Senkbeil and Earley have written books that I’ve already seen bear fruit in my own life and those of our students. I am thankful for their work (which means I can point to them here and leave them off the lists below! See what I did?)

As my own contribution to the list-making season, I’ve tried to share some things that I’ve enjoyed this year across a few categories, meaning few are brand new works—more so just new to me. Maybe you’ll find something new for yourself to interact with in 2020. Also, as part reflection, I’ve included a few thoughts that in another year might have been blog posts, and for now are sentences at best.

10 is a lot, and it turns out, sometimes 5 is too. Here are 5 (or 4) things in each category.

-MK

Reads I Really Enjoyed

• Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra by CS Lewis
  I’ve often heard that people find this trilogy to be among their favorite of his work. These two books felt like I seeing a new side of an old friend, a secret talent that had long lay hidden away. His work, The Great Divorce, is among my favorite works I’ve ever read—and sections of these two books are now right there with it. Lewis has a way of describing ordinary things in ways that make one feel like they’re seeing it for the first time, and thus need to reinterpret previous experience. These were treats to read.
• Theology as a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith by Adam Neder
  This little book is punchy, full of help, and a needed gut check for the learner and teacher. Since I teach multiple times a week now, there were many parts of this work that gave insight and corrective toward how to steward the classroom, and my own heart in the process. Last week I shared a few quotes from the work here.
• The Fabric of Theology by Richard Lints
  This was certainly the densest and most helpful book I read this year in regards to understanding culture. Written in the early 90’s, Lints walks through the patchwork nature of the modern evangelical theological vision, and illustrates the need for comprehensive thinking regarding one’s own theological worldview which makes one wonder how he could read 2019 so well 25 years ago. This book explained postmodernity and its impact upon modern evangelicalism in a single chapter that is worth the cost of the book itself. For the 14 Residents that read it this fall, each found it eye-opening and helpful in understanding the last century of our faith, and the challenge ahead of us.
• How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs
  This book introduced me to Jacobs, and I immediately began to follow his work. I signed up for his newsletter, which I enjoy regularly, and try to keep up with his blog. Jacobs is a regular contributor to Mars Hill Audio, and I constantly learn new things from his work. This is a handbook for how to look at our current moment and resist the urge to fight on its terms. Pair this with The Coddling of the American Mind, and you’ve got quite the combo of thought.
• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
  I stayed up late in a quiet house last night to finish the last few chapters of this book. I couldn’t put it down. I’ve got a shelf of books in my office that all have the theme of sabbath / rest / hurry in their titles, and Comer seems to interact with most of them in this single work, meaning he weaves pieces of arguments together in a way that is readable, relatable, and helpful. This is a good book. It is the why, the what & the how, leaving you with practical steps to think through enacting what he’s talking about: living in the way of Jesus with a more present minded rhythm of life. This is the last full read of 2019 for me, and I am thankful for it.

Things I Will Re-Read

• Who God Says You Are – Klyne Snodgrass
  I will read this book for the third time in January with our Residency Program. My D.Min supervisor first pointed it out while I was researching virtue formation. For a better part of two years I read the field on emotional health and identity formation. I carried four books out of that season, Snodgrass being among the top of the list. The final chapter is his plea to “become a real person.” For a media saturated, digital native age, I can think of fewer necessary calls than that of becoming who God says we are. Not our culture, not ourselves, not our experience, but our Maker. This is true humanity.
• An Unhurried Leader: The Lasting Fruit of Daily Influence by Alan Fadling
  This book is a slow burn. It does some category-shifting for the performance addicted, and is a needed corrective to leadership that is based on task instead of people. Fadling has great things to say. I read this slowly the first time, and can tell that his lessons are born out of living the thing rather than merely talking of it.
• The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson by Stanley Hauerwas
  I first heard of this book on a Mars Hill Audio interview with Ken Myers. The work is a collection of letters that Hauerwas wrote to his godson on the importance of different virtues. So a tenured professor writes to an 8 year old about the importance of constancy. Seventy years between them, and the reader walks away grateful for the reminder of the character we hoped for at 20, lamented at 30, and long for in the years ahead. This book gave language for virtues that I will use with my children, and myself.
• The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) and The Wingfeather Saga (Peterson) – Here’s a short film of The Wingfeather Saga.
  My father read the Hobbit to my sister and I when we were young. I’m doing the same for my children now, and my son is captivated by Smaug the Dragon. He’s four, and I wanted something to capture his imagination. He asked me not to make the Gollum voice any more when I read it, so I think we’re there. We’re big believers in reading out loud in our house, and it has been so pleasant to hear this story in the again. I figure we’ll start in on Middle Earth when it’s time. The LOTR trilogy were the first books I read after my masters, a kind of baptism back into fairy tales from the land of academia. It’s time again. Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga is being re-released this year in a new hardback edition, and we’ll be purchasing them for our library. I’ve listened to the series via audiobook twice through, and am thankful for an epic tale for a new generation that has much depth and beauty within. These are excellent reads.

Things I Want to Finish Reading:

• The Pastor in a Secular Age by Andrew Root
  I must have picked up 8 books this year that began with a reference to Charles Taylor. He was in EVERYTHING. Root is charting the pastoral vocation through the ages, and so far it’s really intriguing, albeit a bit technical in places. I bought it in conjunction with building a lecture around post-modernity and secularism.
• Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang
  At a recent conference, this book was mentioned by a friend as a go-to for pedagogical methods and how to move from lecture to active learning environments in specific, concrete ways. I scanned and found an exercise to practice for our closing lecture in the Training Program this fall and it led to fruitful discussion. I’m eager to read more.
• Invitation to a Journey: A Roadmap for Spiritual Formation by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.
  This book keeps getting referenced and footnoted in a lot of my reading, and so I would like to read his complete picture of being conformed to the image of Christ. It’s a little like Taylor, meaning it’s always in the footnotes.
• The Man of God: His Calling and Godly Life: Volume 1 of Pastoral Theology by Albert N. Martin
  This series is the print version of a decades-old pastoral training course, one that used to be on cassettes for those looking to be mentored in what it meant to be an under-shepherd and overseer. Martin pastored a local congregation for 46 years, forming these thoughts through experience and then among those in the classroom. These are the kind of books that I love to sit with, the collected written fruit of a lifetime faithfulness and the call of the Scriptures to get wisdom.

Things I Learned a Bit More This Year: 

• Communicating clearly with people takes a lot of patience, perseverance, and grace. Then there is the other person involved.
• I overcomplicate most things. Life is more simple than we make it. Love people, be honest, work hard. Take people seriously, yourself less so. Rest and play on repeat.
• In order to be good at anything, I’m convinced I need to do less, better. The lie of this age is that you can do increasingly more equally well.
• The Christian life is a fight to live in reality at every turn. This world offers us fantasy and distraction as a means to escape our inability to be still. The road out of fantasy is the way into true life.
• Mostly, I am praying these days that I would not confuse being well-read with well-lived. These are not the same thing.

Here’s to a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, friends. May God bless you and keep you, may he cause his face to shine upon you.

*Things have been full lately, so here we are a month late. I’m learning to hit send instead of continuing to mull over the right way to say it. Enjoy. – MK

§ Deformed by Distraction

I’ve been reading about spiritual disciplines since high school, and I still struggle to consistently do the thing I know will bring about the ends that I want. Willard says this is the general human failing, to “want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.”

Ouch.

I want to be formed by the Spirit into the image of Christ, and it feels like many days I am being deformed by app designers and dopamine. The road to sloth is paved with glowing rectangles.

And for all the warning of what is happening, we accommodate ourselves to being used by machines instead of using them. After plenty of books, talks, podcasts and posts about hurry, rest, sabbath, and habits—I can tell you there is plenty of data about the crisis of virtue in the western world, largely fed by the very tech we’ve trusted for deliverance from the weight of boredom and the thinness of our own character and relationships. This should be offensive to us, and it momentarily is if we will give our attention to it, but the cost to convenience, false connectedness, and the pull of dopamine (which is merely the anticipation of something good happening, not getting the good itself) keeps us bound.

I attended a conference put on by the Center for Pastor Theologians last month. Given their topic around technology and faith, I’ve been waiting for several of the talks to be available online. When they do, you will find it here. In the meantime, the CPT has released Felicia Su Wong’s talk, Digital Life as Secular Liturgy via their podcast. I took 6+ pages of notes during this talk, and am thankful to be able to hear it again. Note that it is in two parts on the podcast – episodes 34 + 35.

§ Get Wisdom. 

Last week in the Training Program, I taught on the biblical wisdom literature, and then preached on it at Mosaic Church in Richardson (audio here).

In studying for lecture, I was struck by how in our secular, post-christian world, we have traded the classical view of wisdom for the availability of information. The internet in your pocket has leveled the street value of experience and expertise. Life hacks, how to guides, and self-help books have replaced the call of the scriptures to get wisdom, because they have built the foundation of wisdom on self, and not upon faith in our Creating God. The Bible says  at all costs, get wisdom—our modern culture seeks wisdom through information, and we trust in our own judgement, our own rationalism more than revealed knowledge. 

It reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s poem:

Choruses from the Rock

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
o perpetual revolution of configured stars,
o perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
o world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

§ Are you successful?

I really enjoyed this video from Ned Bustard, an illustrator whose work I first came across in Every Moment Holy. (Note: I would buy this book, and consider giving it as a gift this Christmas. It is uniquely special.) Now don’t let that distract you from this video.

“We were made, in joy, to make things in and for joy.” Amen and amen.

§ Currents

• I’m looking forward to reading through Isaiah this year during Advent via Tony Reinke’s reading plan. It starts this Sunday if you want to join in.
• My wife and I have really enjoyed listening and talking through John Mark Comer and Jefferson Bethke’s podcast: Fight Hustle, End Hurry.
• On a recent trip I finally got to see the movie, Yesterday. I enjoyed it so much I watched it on both legs of the trip. Since then I’ve been happily humming the Beatles with zero regrets.
• My oldest child and I are working through Ryan Lister’s new work, Emblems of the Infinite King, and it is fantastic. As a theology primer for kids, it is giving me language to use with adults. Ryan has done a great job, and the book itself is illustrated beautifully.
• If you made it this far, cheers! I’d love to hear from you on twitter or instagram.

§ Alan Jacobs and the Reticence of the Bible

Jacobs writes in his latest newsletter:

“I’ve also been thinking lately about how the Bible tells stories. Erich Auerbach famously said that the biblical narratives are “fraught with background,” with so much that matters but is unspoken. (For example, what does Abraham think when God tells him to sacrifice his son?) Robert Alter calls this the “reticence” of biblical story, and while both of them were referring to the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament can be reticent too. So in response to that reticence I’ve been telling a few small stories of my own: one, two, three.”

There are moments between the text that require the imagination of the reader to see the humanity of the text. The phrase, the reticence of the text, struck me as I read it, along with Jacobs’ own stories linked above. Over the years I have tried to look into the text with my imagination, and akin to Jacobs, here are a few of my own attempts to see the humanity of the text:

Acts 9:26-27
Exodus 12: If We Survive the Night
Holy Week (Day by Day)

§ Art and the Reticence of the Bible: Rembrandt

Rembrandt is one of my favorite artists. Other than an art history course at A&M, my first introduction at length was Nouwen’s meditation on The Return of the Prodigal Son. What a book.

I recently discovered Art Twitter, and have really enjoyed seeing sketches, studies and etchings from @ArtistRembrandt that give image to the biblical text, helping us look into history and think of the background.

I have been drawn to the use (and absence) of detail in these sketches. They are really stunning. Here are a few for you to see:

The Return of the Prodigal Son: 

(I posted this on instagram and my friend shared a quote from Peter Brown quoting Augustine: “The Father of the prodigal son ‘falls on his shoulders.’ It is Christ placing his yoke on the Christian, and in a flash we see the incident as Rembrandt would see it; every line of the heavy figure of the old man charged with meaning.”)

Jesus writing in the sand when approached with the woman caught in adultery:

Pilate presenting Jesus before the people:

Christ being removed from the cross:

 

§ Books to check out

I’ve spent the last two months planning the curriculum for the second year of our TVCI Residency Program. That means I’ve been scouring tables of contents, calculating page counts and trying to refine learning outcomes. I’m really excited and hopeful for the conversations we get to have with our incoming class of Residents.

Along the way I’ve come across some resources that I couldn’t fit into our curriculum this year (or I’m waiting for them to be published). Posting them here for you (and as a reminder to myself to read them).

The Pastor in the Secular Age, Andrew Root  / Podcast Interview with Root: The Pastor Writer
In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, Jake Meador
Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making, Andrew Peterson
Christian Philosophy: A Systematic and Narrative Introduction, Bartholomew and Goheen

§ A Must Listen: This Cultural Moment

The current task of discipleship involves the process of awakening to cultural narratives and anti-gospels presented by modernity, and confronting their impact in our own lives with the true narrative of the Gospel of Christ. It’s an awareness of the history of redemption, of which we stand in the same timeline that Paul stood as he spoke with authority to an unbelieving culture in his day.

To this end, cue the podcast, This Cultural Moment, hosted by Mark Sayers and John Mark Comer.
This is a must listen for what it means to interact with a post-Christian society. These conversations are incredibly helpful. Go ahead, start listening.

§ Routine

Come mid-August, the environments I work with are ramping back up for the school year, and this series will move to being posted at the end of the month. As always, I’d love to hear from you on twitter if you want to interact. Thanks for reading.