The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
If you were to read one book on the impact of media and information technologies, let it be this one. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was the question Carr posed for a cover story in the Atlantic, the answering of which led to this convicting book. Information technologies all carry an “intellectual ethic,” Carr contends, tracing the history of humanity’s intellectual tools and the impact they have on the way we think. While the printed book shaped us to patterns of contemplation, attention, and creativity, the internet bears an industrialist ethic of efficiency, speed, and consumption. Google may not make us stupid—we are trained to scan and skim at ever quickening speeds—but it certainly makes us shallow, less inclined to reach depths of insight, wisdom, and creative reflection. I have found this book helpful and convicting as I consider my own use of media technologies.
Culture Making by Andy Crouch
What is culture? Until reading this exhilarating book, I tended to perceive culture as a nebulous force that dwells in cities, drives moral decisions, and is the arbiter of the arts world. It’s the thing about which Christians are often confused, which leads to the various unhelpful postures Crouch lists in his book—critiquing, condemning, consuming, and copying. How joyous then to read this declaration that culture is simply what I as a human, in the company of other humans, make of the world: the cooking of an omelette, the stewing of chili, the crafting of a house, the jotting of a poem. This is Crouch’s joyous affirmation that what we are meant to be when it comes to culture is no more and no less than creators, acting in the image of God.
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
A swift and engaging history of philosophy explored in the charming form of a story, Sophie’s story. Every day fourteen-year-old Sophie receives a letter with various questions, then a package from a mysterious mentor who sends her bits of philosophy to help her explore and answer the questions in the letter. Part mystery, part history, part delightful novel, this is an excellent introduction to the world of Western philosophy that helps a reader (along with Sophie) to recognize how we come by our assumptions, our identities, and our patterns of understanding.
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
I’ve heard this book quoted so often I feel I’ve actually read it. I haven’t. But I know it will shape my thoughts in profound ways when I do. So I asked my sister, Joy, a PhD student in the realm of virtue ethics, to review it instead (she’s brilliant). Here’s what she says:
Have you ever wondered why our culture seems incapable of engaging in meaningful conversations about moral issues without dissolving into shrill, seemingly irresolvable disagreement? In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre contends that the culprit of this trouble is emotivism (moral statements are meaningless), and the solution to our present confusion is the reclamation of the sturdier (and more imaginative) Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics (in which virtuous character is a foundation for ethical judgment). The text is interspersed with compelling literary and historical examples—he finds Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines particularly inspiring! This book is for anyone who wants a baptismal introduction to the history and substance of modern moral philosophy. It is a book of hefty substance that you will feel proud to have finished, but I would recommend reading and discussing it with a friend to get the most out of this meaty masterpiece.
Begotten or Made? by Oliver O’Donovan
This is one of the books I discovered as part of an ethics course at Oxford, a slim volume constructed of five lectures O’Donovan gave regarding bioethics and the formation of personhood. More than any other book I’ve read, this tight, keen volume has helped me to frame my understanding of modern bioethics in the profound identity that was meant to come to each child born as someone begotten by love, as Christ was the “only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14, KJV). What O’Donovan demonstrates is the dangerous way in which we are now tampering with human biology and identity through the use of medical technology. Our modern mind-set, O’Donovan explains, comes from a radical redefinition of freedom as the “abolition of limits,” a modern view equating personal freedom with release from the bonds of religion, society, and nature. In reading this (and I have little scientific background), I have been equipped to comprehend and discern the spiritual issues underlying the current cultural debates on gender, sexuality, procreation, and personhood. I think this resource will be indispensable in the years to come.
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Written in the early days of media technology, Postman argues that “form excludes the content,” that some mediums of communication are limited in the complexity of the ideas they can communicate. Postman’s concern was with TV, but consider this quote (before social media was even around) in light of our multiple technologies now: “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” Yikes. A book to help us examine our use of media technologies and to weigh their influence on the way we learn, debate, and perceive each other in modern society.
Also by Postman:
Technopoly
Too Small to Ignore by Wess Stafford
In this moving memoir and plea, the president emeritus of Compassion International powerfully argues for the Christian responsibility to consider the “little ones,” the hungry and lost, the deserted and lonely children of the world. Drawing on the painful circumstances in his own childhood, Stafford articulates a vision of the gospel that engages, protects, and cultivates “the least of these” in every society. I found this a profoundly helpful and compassionate book, both practical and visionary in empowering the average believer to act as an advocate for those with no voice.
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
I haven’t been in the studies of many professors or priests, but this book has been on the shelf of every one I have been in, and it seems to inform quite a few of the theologians I’ve read as well. A masterpiece written from a lifetime of philosophical study, this book identifies the profound implications of living in a “secular age,” one in which every person alive must choose faith out of a multitude of competing options. A fascinating history of faith, doubt, and human consciousness, this book more than almost any other provides an explanation of the cultural atmosphere in which we learn, love, and believe. It’s a couple of inches thick, though, so take it slowly. I certainly do.
Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf
In a world increasingly shaped by violence, with cultures emerging from the war-torn twentieth century, Volf contends for the powerful possibility of reconciliation as modeled by Jesus, who had all power and yet did not retaliate against his enemies. Rather, Christ opened his arms in the embrace of forgiveness, the divine gesture that halts the circle of retaliatory violence. Volf’s writing is shaped by his firsthand knowledge of violence and forgiveness as witnessed in his home country of Croatia in its conflict with Serbia.
From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World by Norman Wirzba
How should Christianity shape our care and use of the natural world? This is the question Wirzba sets out to answer. Confronting the difficulty of many Christians in separating creation care from nature worship or knowing how to use natural resources with integrity, Wirzba defines the world not vaguely as nature but as creation, God’s wondrous gift, which requires our gratitude, responsibility, and care.
Chapter 6Books Can Cultivate the IMAGINATION
Believing the Truth That Beauty Tells
Fairy land arouses a longing for [a child] knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emp
tying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
C. S. LEWIS, OF OTHER WORLDS
THE YEAR AFTER THOMAS and I were married, I found myself in London very early on a frosty January morning. Thomas was in town for a conference, and I’d tagged along, in need of a change of scene. But I was tired. The day had barely begun, and I already felt bone weary, dogged by the half-finished work of my final papers, by a case of the blues brought on by reading the morning headlines on the bus, and by the anxious weariness that I was soon to learn signaled the coming of a baby. The walking day ahead looked very long, and my adventurous spirit seemed to have wandered off without me as I rambled aimlessly around the squares of Covent Garden, downhearted, waiting for shops to open, hoping for a café.
And then, abruptly, there was music. Music so full and living and quick it was like sunlight slicing through fog. The tint of the air seemed to visibly brighten. I watched people all around me startle, stop, and search for the source of the music, something golden and swift by Mozart. I followed. We found the musicians, four of them, by leaning over a balcony, looking down into one of the warmer corners of Covent Garden. The group stood in a half moon: a cellist, a flutist, and two violinists. They were bundled in faded sweaters and battered boots, with sly flairs of color in one violinist’s blue scarf and the flutist’s red beret.
They danced as they played, stomping and twirling in laughing sync. They played with frost-reddened noses and fingers, but the cold seemed not to bother them at all. It was as if the music was their warmth; it sprang from deep within them, part of heart and muscle, emerging into their fingers, received by the strings of the violin or flute or mellow-throated cello. I watched with a dozen others, fascinated. People smiled. Toes tapped. Who knew why they had braved the cold and the dawn to shatter the fog with their song light. All we knew was that they laughed as they played. They caught our eyes and winked.
And in a sudden, unraveled happiness, standing at that rail, I knew a quality of joy that comes more and more rarely to me since childhood. I knew innocence. Happiness without shadow of fear. I stood there for half an hour as they played, and I left the cold and heaviness of my heart behind. The music made me childlike, because for an instant, its potent beauty allowed me a shifted, inner vision of the joy that is coming, coming, coming. The fleeting shadows of my morning trouble, my weariness, my fear were phantoms that blessedly died in the strong light of the singing around me.
And I knew afresh, in a knowledge that was grace to my heart and health to my body, that the great promise of beauty, the thrummed message that sings to us in those moments when we are struck by art or music or story, is that, as Sam Gamgee breathlessly puts it at the end of The Return of the King, everything sad is going to come untrue.
That moment helped me to remember something that I have known in some of the surest, happiest times in my life: that a woman who reads is a woman who has been prepared to accept the truth that beauty tells, to embrace the good news that imagination brings, the promise of joy that greets us in the happy endings or poignant insights of the novels we love. She has learned to glimpse eternity as it shimmers in story or song, to receive the satisfaction of a happy ending as a promise. She has come to recognize the voice of love speaking in the language of image and imagination and to trust what it speaks as true.
But it took me a very long time to come to that trust.
I was in my teens when I began to be aware of the tension I felt between what I experienced as deep, spiritual comfort in the novels I was reading and my sense that faith was supposed to be based on facts. I felt like half a heretic to admit that The Lord of the Rings kept me believing in redemption or that Aslan made God real to me when I was sick of church. I felt guilty when a novel made me feel closer to God than a psalm.
I don’t think I’m alone in this: the suspicion of the spiritual comfort afforded by a story is a theme I’ve encountered countless times in my work on reading. I’ve had numerous conversations with concerned parents who questioned my recommendations (in books and in talks) of the Narnia books, The Lord of the Rings, or even classic fairy tales, because they were not “real” and might lead children away from the truth. I have argued with close friends who chose to give up the reading of novels in order to focus only on what is “true,” and I have watched teenagers struggling with doubt feel guilty for the way a story helps them feel close to God.
The problem is that we in the modern world have been taught to largely equate truth with fact. We are shaped by an Enlightenment view of human reason and an increasingly mechanical model of science, leading us to believe that reality can be defined only by what is visible and measurable, by what we can prove and thus control. In the wider secular culture, this is expressed as materialism, the belief that there is no spiritual reality and that the observable world is all that actually exists. Secular materialism dismisses belief in spiritual reality and the use of imagination as false; it sees beauty as dispensable and subjective, emotion as chemical, imagination (and with it, religion) as mere fantasy. Ironically, this view increasingly influences the way we live out our faith and speak about God, as apologists seek to argue God’s existence on materialism’s own terms, using scientific proof–style reasoning and analytical debate to “prove” the reality of the spiritual world. It filters down to us in a thousand ordinary ways, shaping our models of spiritual growth on lines of productivity or casting faith as an assent to a list of doctrinal statements rather than the renewal of our whole selves and stories. It makes us doubt the “usefulness” of beauty or the spiritual purpose of imagination.
But this is a profoundly un-Christian view of faith and personhood. To reject image, emotion, and story as peripheral to faith is to ignore the way God created us—as beings made in his image to create in our turn, as souls capable of both reason and analysis but also equally capable of imagination, creativity, and emotion. We are living stories whose lives turn on our hope of the ultimate happy ending, and we too quickly forget the fact that faith is described as “the assurance of things hoped for” (or perhaps, imagined), “the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, NASB). We miss the reality that much of Scripture comes to us as narrative, that the Psalms are also poems, that allegory and metaphor make up much of the prophets’ writings, and that the gospel appeals to us in the form of a story. If Jesus himself used parables to illustrate and announce the coming of his Kingdom, if he felt that the tale of a prodigal son was the best way to introduce the glory of grace or that the story of a lavishly merciful Samaritan was the ideal means to speak of God’s compassion, then we, too, can embrace both story and imagination as realms in which we may encounter and know God’s own truth.
But before I came to peace with that fact, I needed someone to explain how imagination worked, to give me permission to accept the grace I found in my books. This gift first came to me through an Oxford tutor who led me through a study of C. S. Lewis and the way he understood imagination. I can still remember my urgent sense of curiosity on the March afternoon when I sank into a green armchair in my tutor’s office, glancing up at an illustration inspired by The Great Divorce of a godlike man instructing a small mortal. I felt this to be an appropriate image as we began our conversation and I read my essay aloud to someone who could, by memory, finish every Lewis quote I started. But in real God-like fashion, he came straight down to my level, noticing the troubled look on my face and asking what was bothering me.
The question burned on the edge of my tongue, and driven by the hunger in my heart, I blurted it out: “How can a story or a moment of beauty be as true as a doctrinal statement? Sometimes it’s the only way I can believe in God. But how in the world can I defend that?”
My tutor kept his place by the window, wrapped in a woolen coat warm enough for a Narnian winter. A beam of low, wintered sunlight fell across his face, obscuring the keen eyes behind his
glasses, lending an inscrutable calm to his countenance as he turned to face me and, in a voice of perfect English precision, told me that I must not, “simply must not,” think of stories as untrue. He was almost stern.
“Remember the beam!” he commanded. Then he sat down to explain the essay I’d studied that week, one written after C. S. Lewis converted to Christianity, an event driven by Lewis’s discovery that there was more than one way to “know.” As a young man, Lewis was an atheist, one who totally embraced secular materialism. But like me, he was also a lover of stories—Norse myths and The Wind in the Willows, Arthurian legends and Dickens novels—and he felt that the books he loved communicated something holy, beautiful, and true. They filled him with a knowledge that he called joy, the sense of something eternal and good that simply didn’t fit the narrow box of materialism. Lewis came to faith largely because he grew to understand that what he encountered in those stories was every bit as true as a scientific statement of fact, because there’s more than one way to encounter reality.
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