Talking Heads

My essay on the financial crisis was published at "Call and Response," the blog of Faith & Leadership, a resource website from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. Click here to read on the Faith & Leadership website, or read the unedited version below.

As the financial crisis continues to unfold, all eyes are trained squarely on cable news networks for updates and analysis. In fact, watching cable news and discussing the Dow Jones Industrial Average has become a chief point of common experience for Americans. What they find in that common experience is a shotgun approach of short, shallow stories. Because pain and panic sell, those are the common themes in broadcasts.

The turn of attention away from traditional points of civic discourse--churches or the town square--is typically described as a matter of demand. The argument is that people increasingly expect to be able to get news at any time and to see personality-driven analysis of that news. They want that analysis to come from politically-identifiable biases, for which "fair and balanced" has become helpful shorthand.

The issue is actually one of supply, and it should be of grave concern to churches and related institutions. In a world of short, shallow stories, truth is lost.

The coverage of retention bonuses paid to AIG executives is a fantastic and sad example. In March of 2008, as the first hints of financial problems at AIG emerged, but long in advance of widespread concern about the economy, executives at the insurance giant started to look for opportunities in stronger companies. In order to stem the tide of departures, AIG promised bonus payouts to a group of key executives: people who were responsible for millions of dollars of income that would help balance the company's losses from what we now know to be dangerous investments. The bonuses kept employees who were key to slowing the company's downfall who could have easily moved on to greener pastures. When those bonuses became due a year later, that story was not nearly as interesting as a differently cast version in which the bonuses were coming from taxpayers to line the pockets of evil market manipulators who caused economic catastrophe. There's an old saw that the truth is easier to tell than a lie, but it's also easier to find evil than good, and evil sells, so why bother seeking the good?

A world that does not know how to listen to a more considered discussion is a dangerous place for Christianity. The truth that binds churches in Christian mission is not a short or shallow story. Following one who ignored gossip and public relations implications to mingle with criminals and prostitutes means that we need to be able to tease out careful distinctions, to look beyond the scope of a few days or a few hours in a news cycle and to historical causes and trends. We need to consider the good in people that the press is willing to label villains and to be honest about the sin in people who are lauded as heroes. Theology is not a simple matter, and throughout history, our churches have said "yes, but," as we augment public discussion. That is exactly the kind of approach the world needs, and if we do not exercise those muscles in this financial crisis, theology will have moved even further from the field of sources contributing to public dialogue.

The church needs to broaden its infrastructure for discourse to include not only theological matters, but also the most complex stories of the day. If the changing economic landscape of the world forces us into change, it should be a broadening of mission and aggressive building of relationships across disciplines so that we have the resources to engage the most complex issues of the day. The church's natural focus on the people and organizations affected by recession is predictable and important, but we need to spend energy struggling to understand the causes too. To say, "I have no idea what credit default swaps are, and so they must be bad and the people who wrote them must be evil," is an intellectually lazy approach, and Christianity is not an intellectually lazy faith.

This is a time when the connections between churches become more valuable, as the complexity of the issues requires sharing the burden of education to dig into the complexities of our new reality. But those complexities are ones that we can master, and the endeavor is one we must undertake to preserve the kinds of rigor and relationships that theological discussion requires. If the church could supply sources of information again, we will move back to the intersection of public discourse. If we form the infrastructure for engaging this kind of economic complexity, our ability to effect positive change is multiplied, and the next crisis may be averted.

Building Lighthouses

An essay of mine was posted at Theolog (the blog of the Christian Century) today. The full version follows:

With the growth of our family from two to three people, travel to the grocery store, not to mention another country, has become challenging, so I watch PBS's Rick Steves Europe on a regular basis to get my travel fix. In a recent episode, he told me about a remote corner of Ireland called "Hook Head" (Google Map). In the fifth or sixth century--who's really counting when you get that far back?--a monk named Dubhan led a group to this peninsula, which juts out in a strategic position protecting the Waterford harbor, and set up a monastery. They soon noticed the bodies of sailors who had perished against the rocky coastline washing up on their pristine beach, and took time away from their monastic calling to set up a beacon. They operated the beacon for the next thousand years, give or take a few. Rick's Irish tour guide says:

The monks came here for solitude and to save souls. It would have been their original task, I suppose, but they ended up saving lives. It probably became a bigger goal for them rather than saving souls.

I'm not sure I buy that theory. Saving lives was a logical and essential part of saving souls and not a separate goal at all. But the point remains: in the pursuit of their callings, they learned a whole other trade and devoted themselves to generations of tending a lighthouse. Were they any less true to their chief calling for that effort? It seems clear to me tending a lighthouse was the only way they could be true to their calling: they pursued God to a rocky coast and found a bunch of dead sailors. God occasionally speaks clearly.

Today we want clergy to professionalize and focus on their vocation as ministers without needing to earn an income through other commitments. Economists talk about "comparative advantage": the principal that individuals and their societies benefit when each person does those things for which they are best skilled. Our churches' ministers have extensive theological training that means they have a comparative advantage when preaching and providing pastoral case as opposed to, say, tending a lighthouse.

Focus on our own advantages holds a danger though: in an increasingly professionalized and specialized world, how will clergy and laity relate to each other? Dubhan's monks understood the basic challenges of life as a sailor, and they worked at meeting needs on the way to building relationships. Can my minister understand the challenges for folks in all sorts of jobs who wear micro-specialties as badges of honor?

What if instead of one more preaching institute class or an extra meeting of the committee for the realignment of the Northeastern section of the Southern district, my minister went with me to a basic estate planning seminar? Or with one of my friends to a lesson planning meeting at the middle school? Or to a job site for an
afternoon with a general contractor? What if we decided to be radical and develop positions for interested new clergy in settings that enabled them to attend a year of graduate school in another discipline in the same way that foreign missionaries study the language of their host country? Clergy would not suddenly start building lighthouses, but they might have a better perspective on some of the dark places and bright spots in the world of their congregations.

What lighthouses do we need to build at the corner of our church property? Where will we find people to do the building?

The Extras of Faith

The good folks at Theolog, the blog of the Christian Century, posted an essay of mine today. The full essay, which was edited for length on Theolog, follows in its unedited form.

In response to the overwhelming emotion and responsibility of holding my newborn child a few moments after his birth recently, I did something that I do far too rarely for a Christian, not to mention a seminary graduate and former minister: I prayed. Frankly, it wasn't a very creative prayer. I gave thanks for the love my son's mother and I share and for the strength and grace to show that love to him with some tiny portion of the expertise my own parents have demonstrated throughout my life. He was soon back in his mother's arms, with my prayer rather unartfully ended, when my thoughts turned to the things my wife and I will teach our son.

When I hear about public schools having to cut out offerings in the arts and languages because of finances or in order to teach to a test, my deep sadness is mitigated by my likely arrogant reasoning that I can teach my child about the arts pretty effectively, and even if his education from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon is geared toward a narrow measure of achievement to the detriment of creative thought and cultural awareness, he will hear his mother play the trumpet and his
father sing, and he will see our enthusiasm for travel, and he will turn out just fine.

But the "three 'R's" and even the arts are not the most important things we have to teach. When I was overwhelmed with emotion and responsibility, I prayed, and that's what I want him to do too; raising our son as a Christian and a member of our congregation has never been questioned. After that first prayer, though, I started to wonder more actively about the division of labor in his Christian education.

Just as my local schools struggle with how to teach children in ways that will lead to positive evaluations of the school (and the student), my local church and thousands of others like it struggle with how to teach and inspire faith to and in children in ways that insure their ability to face the tests and struggles of life. Of course I want my child to learn that God loves him, and that God created him and everything around him, and that God's son Jesus saved him from the tyrrany of fear and death and injected unstoppable hope into this world just like I want him to learn verb conjugation, American history, and long division. Those things are the building blocks of his faith and secular education, respectively. But what about the arts and culture of church? Just as in schools, where end-of-grade testing looms and scares parents and teachers into abandoning the richness of those subjects outside the "core," in churches a pervasive "siege" mentality and even intimidation at the beauties of tradition convince us to throw out complexity under the label of superfluity and to focus on the basics. In our churches, the theory doesn't stop with children: simplicity is the order of the day.

My arrogant reasoning applies here too. I can teach him to read music so that he can sing centuries worth of hymns from a shared book, and I can teach him that his best friend's Presbyterian church is historically different than his Methodist church without falling into a trap of superiority. I can walk him around a cathedral in Europe and tell him the names and purposes of the various worship spaces, and I can tell him about bowing beside the processional cross and why people fight about whether to have a national flag in the sanctuary. I can give him many of the ingredients for a richer faith.

But church is not about my child being better prepared. My Christian identity requires that I am just as concerned about the richness of the faith of my son's peers too, and so my prayer turns into a challenge -- a calling.

And then I wonder, don't I have the same sort of obligation to seek richness for other children's non-religious education?

Visit over at Theolog and join the conversation. Thanks!