At long last, students’ end-of-semester studying and stress have yielded to picnics, barbecues, and other festivities culminating in commencement. At one gathering, I had the privilege of addressing the graduating seniors of our men’s and women’s residences. “My commission to you today,” I began, “is probably not what you expect. It’s not what you are likely to hear at commencement, nor what you have likely heard from most Christian teachers and preachers. My advice to you upon your graduation is this: Be ordinary.”

Cornell students have heard that they are smart, special, and privileged; that they should be role models, do great things for God, and change the world. Although there is truth in these things, framing faith within the cult of success has led to unhealthy and unsustainable levels of stress, fatigue, and feelings of inadequacy.

This is the theme of theologian Anthony Bradley’s viral tweet and subsequent article on the millennial generation’s ‘narcissism epidemic.’ “A few decades ago, an entire generation of baby boomers walked away from traditional churches to escape the legalistic moralism of ‘being good,’ but what their millennial children received in exchange … was shame-driven pressure to be awesome and extraordinary young adults expected to make a difference in the world immediately.” This striving to succeed, Bradley says in words that echo Jeremiah 29, leaves young adults feeling as if it’s not enough to just marry and have children, get a job, and be a good citizen–not enough, that is, to simply love God and neighbor.

To be sure, Chesterton House encourages students to take their studies seriously and even to cultivate “the life of the mind.” Academic excellence, however, is best grounded in a comprehensive vision of what it means to be human. To put figure and frame in their proper perspective, the pursuit of excellence must take place in the broader context of our calling as disciples of Jesus.

Bradley connects the dots well. What we need, he says, is not a cycle of reacting against the ethos of previous generations, which has led to boomers moving to suburbs and millennials migrating back to Brooklyn. What we need is rather a robust vision of the good life in which human flourishing “is characterized by a holistic concern for the spiritual, moral, physical, economic, material, political, psychological, and social context necessary for human beings to live according to their design.” Invoking Abraham Kuyper, he asks, “What if youth and young adults were simply encouraged to live in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, understanding, education, wonder, beauty, glory, creativity, and worship in a world marred by sin?”

Bradley is singing our song. At Chesterton House, we also introduce students to Kuyper for his emphasis on the legitimacy of finding one’s calling in any and every sphere of society, whether art, business, engineering, hospitality, law, literature, medicine, nutrition, or zoology. “Perhaps the best antidote to these pendulum swings and fads,” Bradley concludes, “is simply to recover a mature understanding of vocation so that youth and young adults understand that they can make important contributions to human flourishing in any sphere of life because there are no little people or insignificant callings in the Kingdom.” At commencement time, this reminder that Christian virtues are mostly made manifest in small, ordinary acts of everyday love is a word in season.

Related artice recently discovered: Tish Harrison Warren, Courage in the Ordinary

Several years ago, an itinerant evangelist passing through Ithaca advertised a revival meeting that invited guests to “repent from worldliness.” Why would one wish to do that, a friend asked me–doesn’t worldliness mean traveling and getting exposure to other cultures? How can that be bad?

The word worldly, I attempted to explain, means profane, materialistic, irreligious. “Well,” my interlocutor responded, “that’s not what it ought to mean.”

What I wish I had understood better at the time is the full range of meanings of the word world in Scripture. To be sure, it is sometimes used negatively (“love not the world” 1 Jn 2:15; and “friendship with the world means enmity against God” James 4:4). But it is also used neutrally (“go into all the world” Mk 16:15) and even positively (“for God so loved the world” Jn 3:16). Simply put, world is a complicated word.

Thinking too exclusively of worldly as irreligious has led some Christians to become overly ‘otherworldly’ in their orientation, as evidenced by a narrow understanding of evangelism as ‘saving souls.’ A robust theology of creation, by contrast, affirms the goodness of God’s world and (this is one of our main themes at Chesterton House) our work in the world.

This is an argument that theologian Richard Mouw has been making for over 30 years. Beginning with works such as Political Evangelism (Eerdmans, 1973), Holy Worldliness (Fortress, 1980), and When the Kings Come Marching In (Eerdmans, 1983), Mouw has maintained that the biblical mandate to “fill the earth” (Gen 1:28) refers not only to procreation but also to cultural activity. And not just to cultural activity in the narrow sense of art and literature, but to the broad array of patterns and processes that constitute our social, political, and economic life. We fill the earth in part by establishing just legislation, building sturdy bridges, and reading riveting bedtime stories. We fill the earth also through teaching, research, and other means of faithfully inhabiting academic disciplines and institutions.

Mouw’s theology of culture is grounded not only in creation but also in redemption. In his view, redemption is a renewal of creation (Col 1:19-20). Take, for example, his discussion of the ships of Tarshish. In Isaiah 2, the ships of Tarshish are listed among the sources of pagan pride that will occasion the judgment of God. And yet in Isaiah 60, a vision of the New Jerusalem, there they are again. Why? The judgment of these artifacts, Mouw suggests, is purifying–“more like the breaking of a horse rather than the breaking of a vase. The judgment here is meant to tame, not destroy.” The ships’ former function will be destroyed, but the ships themselves will be recommissioned to the glory of God.

That this vision of heaven includes not only souls but also “stuff” has implications for our present lives. “If God has not given up on human culture,” Mouw says, “then neither must we.” Moreover, because sin is cosmic in scope, so too is redemption. Sin disorders the natural environment, relations among races, and human institutions, and so our work in the world includes creation care, racial reconciliation, and justice work. “Jesus Christ [came] to save sinners. But He also came to reclaim a larger creation that has suffered because of human’s sinfulness.” In this view, creation and re-creation are part of one cosmic work.

Mouw’s contribution to American evangelical social thought and practice has inspired a generation of students and scholars to take cultural life more seriously. That is not to say he advocates simple activism or cultural immersion. Although he speaks of persons as “agents of the full redemption that Christ came to accomplish,” he adds that we are not the builders the Holy City. “The Holy City ‘comes down out of heaven from God’ (Rev 21:2); the Lord is its ‘builder and maker’ (Heb 11:10).” Seeking to steer a biblical course between activism and quietism, Mouw advocates the biblical ideal of seeking the welfare of the city (Jer 29:7).

Are we called to repent from worldliness? By all means. But at the same time, we are called to “holy worldliness.”

In my previous place of employment, we used a database system that caused no end of headaches for its various glitches. Each time a problem was fixed, two more were introduced. Above the server that housed the program was a Post-It note with a message from the developer: “I cannot foresee any further problems at this time.” It was a decade old.

At Chesterton House, we affirm students in engineering and applied disciplines by teaching that part of what it means to be human is to create and develop technology. God placed Adam and Eve in a garden “to work it and keep it,” and though building bridges and developing software may seem far removed from agricultural work, nearly all labor may be understood as part of this cultural mandate. And yet, technology can also be applied toward harmful ends or, as in the case of our dreadful database, entail unforeseen consequences. Given this beautiful-yet-broken characteristic of life, our posture toward technology should be affirmative and cautious.

Most of us, I suspect, tend to be either affirmative or cautious. Technological optimists praise access to new information, while pessimists decry the shallowness of that same information. (“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” Thoreau famously said, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”) As different at they seem, technological optimists and pessimists both tend to evaluate new media according to their content–whether we’re talking about papyrus or Pinterest, the information transmitted is what matters.

Following Marshal McLuhan, however, some scholars say it’s not just the information or content that matters but rather the technology itself, for the very technologies we create in turn reshape or re-create us. Two important books on emerging technologies’ impact on everyday life include Felicia Wu Song’s Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together (Peter Lang, 2009), and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). Although search engines are a great boon, Carr writes, they come at a cost to our capacity for concentration and contemplation. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” The computer screen, he writes, echoing McLuhan, “is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.”

Song is interested in the relationship between online communication and ideals of community. That social media connects us to old friends and distant colleagues is a boon. But just as Carr observes the impact of search engines on our concentration and contemplation, Song documents the social cost of social media. Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, not only make it easier to connect with those far away, but also to avoid cubicle mates and next door neighbors. All of which raises the question: are virtual communities real communities?

Skillfully situating her reflections in the broader context of work by scholars such as Amitai Etzioni, Neil Postman, and Robert Putnam, Song draws insightful conclusions. While social media helps us to adapt existing relationships “to challenges posed by the social realities of geographic distance and the task-cluttered lives that contemporary Americans seem to have,” she writes, the irony is that “while these technologies help us confront the challenges of modernism in these ways, they also serve to exacerbate these conditions and even radicalize them.”

On the eve of Easter, one wonders: since the way of Christ is cruciform — i.e., shaped and formed by the cross — what implications might this have for our engagement with technology?

This is precisely the sort of question we are interested in raising at Chesterton House, and the sort of question that links our public lectures with the emphasis on spiritual formation in our residential communities. We look forward to Song joining us this coming week to give the Alan T. and Linda M. Beimfohr Lecture, entitled “Facebook, Friendship, and the Search for Real Community.” We don’t know exactly what she will be sharing, but given most students’ uncritical engagement with social media, we suspect it will go much further than “I cannot foresee any further problems at this time.”

“In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us… There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Last summer I attended the National Vacation Matters Summit. Sponsored by Take Back Your Time, an organization that advocates for more paid time off for American workers, it was a good place to learn about everything simple, sustainable, and slow—including slow food, slow money, and slow parenting. For the record, I am a fellow traveler of this movement. I bike to work, don’t have a cell phone, and lament that “organized” sports have eclipsed pick-up games. But if slow and simple are solutions, what exactly is the problem?

The problem is our disordered relationship to time. “Always-on communication” results in “continuous partial attention,” “volitional chronic sleep deprivation,” and “vacation deficit disorder.” Wired Magazine defines “social jet lag” as “chronic exhaustion due to persistent conflict between your scheduling software and your body clock.” The paradox of modernity, according to theologian Colin Gunton, is that “a world dedicated to the pursuit of leisure and of machines that save labour is chiefly marked by its levels of rush, frenetic busyness and stress.”1 Liberals and conservatives, secularists and persons of faith all seem to agree that time poverty is a modern malaise.

Hence renewed interest in the Sabbath. You might think we’ve had enough books on this topic in recent years, but you’d be wrong, as evidenced by Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, every chapter of which is a wise and winsome meditation on yet another aspect of this inexhaustible topic. Shulevitz, a Jewish writer who contributed a much-discussed article on the Sabbath to the New York Times Magazine several years ago, frames Sabbath World with the familiar concerns of our cultural disorder. “Like anyone else trying to get ahead,” she writes in the opening chapter, “before I had children I logged late hours and weekends in the office, then complained proudly to my friends. When my children were little, I rushed irritably through every diaper change, every walk, every meal. There seemed no other way to retain economic independence, professional viability, a feeling of competence, the faith that I would continue to exist once I stepped outside the house.” Shulevitz likes the idea of keeping the Sabbath, “but at the thought of actually doing it, I am knocked flat by a wave of anticipated boredom.” Sabbath World is thus about her—and our—ambivalence about the Sabbath.

In subsequent chapters, Shulevitz asks all the right questions. When does the Sabbath day first appear? At the very beginning of the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings. Why then? Because it is part of the larger narrative of God consecrating the Israelites as his Chosen People. How does it contribute to that process? By promoting a distinctive culture (the Sabbath was not tied to the lunar calendar), community spirit (coordinating time off from work forces people “to turn toward one another”), and self-restraint (the Sabbath day and the manna alike require “the self-restraint without which collective life would be impossible”).

As with the manna, we must ask of the Sabbath, What is it? In addition to being a profoundly social institution, it is also a holy day. In order to get a better grip on holiness, Shulevitz asks, Why did God rest? “It seems an odd thing to do. As endings go, it’s pretty muffled.” Or is it? That God “finishes” his work on the seventh day of Creation means that “Sabbath rest is not just a nothing, a not-doing, but a something that requires creating.” And what he creates is rest itself. The Sabbath is thus for ceasing and feasting. Although Shulevitz doesn’t explicitly contrast biblical and modern notions of rest, she correctly identifies the former as inner rest or tranquility, which suggests biblical rest is best understood as the opposite, not of labor, but of restlessness. Here, as elsewhere, the author’s gentle prose disguises the depth of her insights.

No such work would be complete without a discussion of blue laws, and Shulevitz doesn’t disappoint. She summarizes the economic and psychological explanations of Puritan Sabbatarianism offered by Christopher Hill and Michael Walzer respectively, which she judges reductivist. To Shulevitz, Puritans were “people of the book” for whom reading was a sacred act, and Sunday was “the day of the Word’s dominion,” during which it was “preached in sermons, sung in Psalms, read in Scripture, meditated upon in private, and discussed in public.” Perhaps, she suggests, we should think of the Puritan Sunday as a matter of biblical re-enactment. Keeping the Sabbath, in this view, is a mimetic activity designed “to recreate the requisite atmosphere.” For Puritans, the Sabbath was neither boring nor oppressive, but rather “crackled with high drama and sensual joy. It’s just that all these things happened inside the soul, not out in the world.”

This is treacherous territory, and Shulevitz navigates it with skill and grace. Still, this is a surprisingly sympathetic rendering of a day that many diarists documented as joyless indeed. Similarly, she depicts 19th century Sabbatarians as friends of working men and women, which they were, but they were also often nativists motivated by anti-Catholicism. What makes this overcorrection to the historical narrative especially curious is that generations of Jews (among others) have relished depicting Sabbatarians as illiberal enemies of the freedom of religion.

Shulevitz’s sympathy for Sabbatarians is grounded in a conviction worthy of attention: Renunciation is not merely negation, but also, at least potentially, a positive and creative act that makes new things possible. The American Sunday “honored life beyond duty and the imperatives of the marketplace. . . . We had fewer choices, but that lack of choice, in retrospect was liberating.” This ancient wisdom is not entirely forgotten today: the same logic undergirds the parks to be found in virtually every American city. The strict behavioral codes that govern our parks (no rowdiness, no motors, no commerce, etc.), like the rules of any game, simultaneously restrain and enable. For whatever reason, the less-is-more argument has been more persuasive with respect to space than to time; even as preserving parks became popular in the 19th century, Sunday laws became unpopular. Renunciation with respect to time, however, is making a comeback. Slow food, voluntary simplicity, and Take Back Your Time all assert, as does the Sabbath, that there is more to life than producing and consuming. All of which raises the question: Are trips to the spa—or weekends in general—really functional equivalents of the Sabbath? Shulevitz doesn’t want to become “that dreadful thing, a religious person,” and so she resolves to celebrate a day of rest without cutting herself off from the world, only to discover that, well, it’s complicated. Secular or “neo-Sabbatarian” movements have real limitations, she concludes, in part because resistance movements require substantive solidarity. Slow and simple are not sufficient solutions because restlessness runs deeper than mere overwork. Precisely because our disorder turns out to be not just cultural but rather part of the human condition, holiness matters.

How shall we then rest? A first glance, Shulevitz falters at this crucial juncture. Religious Jews welcome the Sabbath into their home as if it were personified, infusing it with almost salvific significance, and Christians personify the Sabbath in the person of Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath. Believers who rest in Christ, as one scholar put it, “will not need to worship their work or work at their play, but there will be an inner liberation, a genuine leisure in the way in which they go about both the work and the play of the week to the glory of God.”2 Shulevitz, by contrast, reiterates her ambivalence about liking the Sabbath more in theory than in practice. As endings go, this seems pretty muffled.

Or is it? At least in one sense, Shulevitz is closer to the Sabbatarians of old than are most modern Christians. What she has understood is not only the value of renunciation, but also that, when it comes to the ever-encroaching world of work, resistance is greatly aided by legal proscription. She thus favors European-style vacations (longer) and workweeks (shorter), suggests we incentivize the coordination of social time by taxing off-hours labor, and—get this—she calls blue laws “underrated.” Indeed the irony is that those most sympathetic to blue laws today include secular and religious Jews, neo-Marxists, and even atheists such as Sam Harris. Although such legal advocacy would have been familiar to Christian Sabbatarians from William Bradford in the 1620s to William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s, Christians today speak of Sabbath-keeping in terms that are essentially experiential and therapeutic. As Shulevitz trenchantly puts it, Christians are no longer Sabbatarians in part because they are busy on Sunday rushing from their megachurch’s ATM machine to the mall.3 If Shulevitz is right about the church’s captivity to consumerism, then perhaps the Sabbath is a feast that will be preserved not primarily by those who have been invited, but by those who are hungriest for a different order of time.

1. Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 73. 2. A.T. Lincoln, “From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical and Theological Perspective,” in From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation, ed. D.A. Carson (Zondervan, 1982), p. 405. 3. Judith Shulevitz, “Bring Back the Sabbath,” in New York Times Magazine (March 2, 2003).

This review originally appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of Books & Culture

Several years ago a graduate student attending a Bible study at our home said, “I’m studying Soil and Crop Sciences, but I’m not at all clear whether or how my faith connects to my studies.” I opened my Bible and began reading aloud: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and dirt.” Although I took some liberties in the translation, the Genesis text is clear. As we at Chesterton House continually remind the students we work with, God cares about the earth in all its messy materiality.

Perhaps nobody appreciates this better than Cornell Professor of Crop and Soil Sciences Gary Fick. Dr. Fick has been a faithful member of the local church and campus Christian communities for 40 years–to the best of my recollection, he was the first Christian professor I ever met at Cornell. For fifteen years he has been my neighbor, and I can attest to his skill in growing everything from blueberries to broccoli. And in 2008 he published a wonderful book entitled Food, Farming, and Faith.

“It’s all about food.” So begins the first chapter of this book. And it’s true. Food production and consumption are all about nature–our use and abuse of creation. Food production and consumption are also cultural–entailing ritual, festivity, and issues of economic status. “Food is a comprehensive theme,” Fick writes. Indeed, whether your interest is in sabbath, sustainability, or social justice, “All aspects of life are interconnected with food.”

But food is also about death. Not only is food security one of the most pressing social and humanitarian issues of the 21st century, but “life comes only . . . by taking life.” This is most obviously true of the plant and animal life that we consume. It is also true of Christ, who gave his life that we might live. We consume His body and blood in anticipation of eternal life and the consummation of all things in Christ.

“In case you thought environmentalism and Christianity were at odds,” Bill McKibben says in his endorsement, “here’s a book that makes clear, in great and rewarding detail, just how closely allied they actually are. This will be a useful primer for the blossoming green religious movement.” Indeed, this is Christian scholarship at its best–a work from someone who has rolled up his sleeves, literally and figuratively, in order to “plow deep.” I asked Gary once how long he worked on the book. His answer: “All my life.”

The audio of Dr. Fick’s lecture, “The Church and Food,” is now posted.

FURTHER READING

The literature on food in general and Christianity and food more specifically has mushroomed in recent years. Articles of interest include Chesterton House board member Ryan O’Dowd’s “Thought for Food” (on the politics and spirituality of food), Cornell faculty member Chris Barrett’s “Overseas Development Assistance” (on food security), and Cornell graduate Mary Eberstadt’s “Is Food the New Sex?” (on, well, one section is entitled “Broccoli, Pornography, and Kant”). In addition to Fick’s Food, Farming, and Faith, other titles of interest include Eat Well, Good Eating, Sharing Food, The Spirit of Food, Year of Plenty, and Grace at the Table. Wendell Berry recently produced Bringing it to the Table; his classic discussion of culture and agriculture is The Unsettling of America. Another classic is Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb. These titles and more are reviewed by our friend Byron Borger at Hearts & Minds Books here and here. The July 2011 issue of The Other Journal is all about food, and Books & Culture just posted this review of Food & Faith. Finally, we’ll mention that the New York Times had an interesting feature on Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic-Farmer Joel Salatin.

Chesterton House aims to help students prepare for life and to glorify God in all that they think, say, and do. Toward this end, we now offer residential living-learning communities in addition to our public lectures.

Christian study centers are popping up on campuses all over the country, in part because of the discouraging data on Christianity and college life. According to a 2006 study, three-fourths of children from churchgoing families disengage from religious practice as young adults. The reasons for this disengagement are several. Students encounter challenges to their faith both in the classroom, where some professors propose competing worldviews, and outside the classroom, where student life staff challenge traditional ideas regarding sexuality and lifestyle choices. Given that religious disengagement is even higher among those who do not attend college, however, other factors may matter more. These include everything from pop culture and K-12 education to the failure of families and churches to effectively impart faith. Finally, behavioral factors contribute to religious disengagement, most notably binge drinking and casual sex.

In “Bacchanalia Unbound,” Cornell graduate Mary Eberstadt paints an alarming picture of the “nocturnal doings of the quad.” Forty percent of students binge drink, and 20 percent do so regularly. Alcohol-related deaths among college students are approaching 2000 per year. Drinking is related to sexual activity and not only of the consensual sort. Almost half of men surveyed who play drinking games report “sexual manipulation” as their motive. Nearly one in five college women experience sexual assault,* with underclass students and sorority members at greatest risk. All of this is to say nothing of the hook-up culture or depression, much less the link between the two. Eberstadt’s account is corroborated by titles such as Pledged, Smashed, Unhooked,andUnprotected, all written within the last few years and, tellingly, all by women.

To be sure, these developments are structural as well as cultural. The higher drinking age, for example, effectively privatized partying among college students. Likewise, relations between the sexes have changed largely because the conditions in which relationships develop–i.e., supply and demand–have changed. Because of internet pornography and the gender imbalance on campus (women now receive 60% of bachelors degrees), men in particular have meager motivation to marry. In any case, binge drinking and casual sex further create an atmosphere unfriendly to faith. As legal scholar David French puts it, they create a culture characterized by decadence (physical temptation and glorification of the baser vices) and stigma (scorn of traditional virtues such as sobriety and chastity). In keeping with French’s suggestion that students sometimes stop professing faith because they first stop practicing it, sociologist Mark Regnerus observes that even “many young adult Christians are making peace with premarital sex.” Needless to say, worshiping on Sunday is made more difficult by partying on Saturday.

Sustaining faith in a largely secular environment is no small challenge, and this challenge is the root of the question that Christian parents everywhere are asking: where can I send my child to college? What we need are places that support both belief and behavior, conviction and community, orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Toward that end, Eberstadt offers two solutions: opt out by attending a religious college, or join the counterculture within one’s university. Although opting out has much to recommend it–Christian colleges are an excellent option for many students–creating countercultures within “secular” universities is equally important, for the large majority of students, including the majority of Christian students, attend secular universities. French comes to the same conclusion as Eberstadt: “If there is one firewall against the temptations of hedonism and the dispiriting Christian stigma, it is vibrant Christian ministries on campus. [These groups are] the single most important factor in maintaining a faith presence on campus.”

And it is toward that same end of supporting both Christian belief and behavior that we launched a men’s residential living-learning community last year and are now launching a women’s community. At their best, the thoughtful conversation and alternative social life of such communities address both the direct challenges encountered in the classroom and the taken-for-granted assumptions about pleasure and the good life encountered after hours. By the grace of God, Chesterton House aims to create something like a Christian college environment within one of the world’s finest research universities. It is a hopeful project and vision, grounded in our hope in Christ, the author and sustainer of our faith (Heb 12:1-2).

Postscript: Five days after this post, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by John Garvey, president of the Catholic University of America, that made many of the same observations.  See “Why We’re Going Back to Single-Sex Dorms.

*May 2014: This statistic is now being called into some question. See “One in five women in college sexually assaulted: the source of this statistic.”