Make America Kind Again

How to host a grading party

This is the last week of the fall semester at Wheaton College. Normally, at some point in the week, I’d be hosting a six-hour, Christmas-themed grading party. Most years, between two and three dozen colleagues stop in, open-house style, between 9:00 and 3:00, spend some time reconnecting and get some grading done. For some, it has become part of what one colleague calls our “academic-liturgical calendar.” Or you might call it our “shadow academic calendar” of regular academic-social events.

Trees

We decorated for Christmas this weekend, and that has me thinking about trees.

…Now you don’t

We made it

Last week, I highlighted a series of stories about the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team and said, “Trust me on this one.” This week, I’m recommending an art exhibition by a quilter. Trust me, again. Scroll down and get ready for a COVID-safe trip to the Art Institute. Or at least click the links in the recommendations section at the end and find some time to check out Bisa Butler’s work online. Here’s a preview.

Beautiful ending

Metaphorically speaking

Academia is…

The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands

On Wednesday evening, we had our discussion of Chapter 3 of The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands, focused on global environmental governance and “the Macondoization of the World.” (Which reminds me to recommend Alvaro Santana-Acuña’s book, )

Favorite photo from a family gathering last Sunday

Few things are more rewarding than collaborating with smart people on important issues, and so I’m excited to be part of the group at Liberating Arts. Thanks to a Networking Grant for Christian Scholars (a project of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities), we’ll be leading a series of conversations on the enduring relevance of the liberal arts.

A Mesmerizing Photo

“Chicagohenge“

The “Eights”

On Thursday, I got to teach one of my favorite class sessions of every fall semester, discussing with my First-Year Seminar students George Saunders’ Fox 8, Psalm 8, and Romans 8.

The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands

Beginning this Wednesday, you can participate in a five-part series on These will be 30-minute sessions, and we’ll go through the book one chapter at a time with a few brief overview comments from me and then Q&A/discussion.

Happy Labor Day weekend, friends!

It’s been a while since I last sent a newsletter. As you may recall, when I kicked this off in March, I said it was experimental. I was looking to see how it would go. I got eleven straight weeks of newsletters through spring and into the first week of June, but then “travel summer” hit. By that I mean that our summer travels began in mid-June, and for a while it seemed like I was away most weekends. That put a stop to the newsletters for a bit.

After travel slowed down, I came back to the heavy lift of preparing for the most challenging fall semester anyone can recall. The good news is that the fall semester has started well, if weirdly (masks, etc.), and that I’ve rarely enjoyed beginning-of-the-semester teaching as much as I am right now. It’s great to be with students who want to be here, learning, despite the COVID challenges, and it’s great to spend so much time doing what we’re here to do, rather than just the “meta-work” behind the scenes that makes it possible. (I am grateful for that meta-work and do think we’ve provided a safe atmosphere through reasonable requirements for students. You can find my thoughts on that here, but I’ll add that I think schools with a long history of establishing and enforcing behavioral requirements with community good at the center will do better with this.)

Meeting Joyce Wagner

Sometimes I wonder what I’ll write in one of these newsletters. Not this week. This week, I’m writing about my encounter with Joyce Wagner, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor I had the honor of meeting, ever so briefly, at yesterday’s rally for racial justice in Wheaton.

Against complacency

In the past three weeks, I’ve published a couple pieces with : This and this essay, , which reflects on the relevance of C.S. Lewis’ “Learning in War-Time” to the ways we see our callings in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Right now, I’m reading a lot by and about the mid-20th century French polymath Jacques Ellul, and this week I reread parts of Andrew Goddard’s Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul. Goddard does his best to try to sort through Ellul’s accounts of his conversion to Christianity, which is no small task, given that Ellul was deliberately quiet about his conversion story – not about his faith, but about the moment of his conversion, which he considered to be an intensely private matter – and when he did recount it later in life, there were slight differences in the telling. This makes it difficult for anyone writing on Ellul to nail down the details of his conversion as neatly as they might wish they could.

From my review of Daniel Vaca’s Evangelicals, Inc.: Books and the Business of Religion in America, published this week by Comment magazine:

If Hutton imagined a Midwest just reaching high noon, more recent writers use a tone that varies between chastened and scared. If the Midwesterner of the early twentieth century represented an America coming into its own, the Midwesterner of the twenty-first symbolizes a center failing to hold. If “anxious eyes” are still fixed here, it is to survey a representative unease.

If you could choose one superpower…

In case you were wondering, “There is no rigid definition of ‘a superpower.’” At least that’s what Wikipedia says.

A mini-tribute to Sir John Houghton

I don’t intend this newsletter to start with something like an obituary on anything like a regular basis, even during this pandemic, and I understand that I noted the passing of Michael Sorkin due to COVID-19 just two weeks ago. But I want to note today . I recommend reading , this piece at the , and the pieces posted at the , over which he presided. It would be presumptuous to think I have much to add to those sources and to the BBC’s piece, but I do want to share two brief stories of my own.

For the most part, I’m taking an Easter weekend break from the newsletter, but I do have a few recommendations – mostly for listening – this weekend.

(If you’re looking for more, now might be a good time to catch up on the past three weeks’ issues. You can read or subscribe here.)

Losses

This past week, we learned that Michael Sorkin, the architect, critic, and urban theorist, died of complications from COVID-19.

Shelter in place = a new pace

Canceling most face-to-face engagements and moving the remainder online does change the pace of things. Suddenly, we find ourselves taking more walks as a family, playing more games (right now, Yahtzee is our favorite, and it’s actually quite raucous), and reading aloud. We’re reading The Hobbit together. We did that once before, a long time ago, reading and the entire when Rose was just old enough to cry that the books were over but none of the kids were old enough for their music and sports schedules to overtake family reading time. If we ever manage this for a third time, we may need a new copy.

Greetings, friends.

Welcome to Issue #1 of Gifts and Forgiveness.

After thinking through a newsletter for a while – probably a little over a year now – I’ve decided to give this a try. For now, let’s consider this an experiment.