Category: Wilderness Wanderings

Anti-Intellectual, Picky, or Not Willing to Share?

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Why don’t pastors use libraries, especially if they have to prepare two sermons a week?

In a 2010 study of ministers’ information use, all ten of the ministers interviewed indicated that they did not use libraries.[4] A 1974 survey intended specifically to aid in helping the Case Memorial Library of the Hartford Seminary Foundation better serve its patrons found that only 5.5% of respondents reported to using the library weekly, and that “the usage by others spread almost evenly among monthly, weekly, bi-weekly, quarterly, annually, and nil categories.”[5] Earlier studies that, like Huseman’s, do not account for work-role nevertheless indicate low library use. A 1961 article in Christianity Today found that of 100 ministers surveyed, only six reported regular library use[6]. A 1944 study – after bemoaning the number of Union Theological Seminary graduates who wasted their time on Readers’ Digest – found that most ministerial books were purchased rather than borrowed.[7]

This consistent finding across time and space is difficult to ignore. But anything one might extrapolate from such data is hamstrung by the lack of studies specifically targeting ministerial library use, and by a general lack of diversity in the studies that have already been conducted. The ministers focused upon are in many cases Southern and Midwestern, and almost exclusively protestant – sampling is limited to Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, members of the Church of Christ, two Roman Catholic Priests, and pastors of murkily defined “evangelical” communities.

So why do (many Protestant) ministers avoid the library? Could it be a lack of academic-theological materials in the collections of most public libraries? A lack of access to specialized religious libraries? A misperception of library resources on the pastors’ part? Or do ministers simply prefer the advantages of the personal library? Answers to these questions would help scholars better understand the information worlds of contemporary ministers, and how they choose and use information to create their religious worlds. Information matters. It must. Why else choose it over the baby’s shoes?

Flag Waving

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Not sure which commenter linked to the piece in the Washington Post about why every state flag is wrong. Whoever you are thanks. It’s worth a glance.

Here’s a sample of Alexandra Petri’s wit upon contemplating the Michigan State Flag (I wonder if she’s the granddaughter of Rob and Laura Petri):

“Yes, of course we have people in Michigan,” this flag says. “It’s just full of people. That is why we have a moose and an elk holding up this sign with a picture of what appears to be a jovially waving yeti on it. But everyone else here is people. And we totally know how to spell TUBER.”

Feeling at Home

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

I used this quote over at Patheos but given the excitements round hyeh the last week or so, a reminder about being strangers and aliens from a Roman Catholic intellectual invoking Augustine might be useful. I will include as well Peter Lawler’s comments about the Confederate Flag for good measure:

I really was quite moved when, driving through the heavily gay midtown section of Atlanta last Sunday, I saw so many homes and businesses flying the rainbow flag with the American flag. It’s not a a small thing that so many gays now feel fully at home in their country, where they’re free to live openly as who they are. But I wish more people were moved by Catholic writers calling for the American flag to be removed from the sanctuaries of their churches. Some argue that it never should have been there in the first place, and a Christian should always think of himself, as Saint Augustine says, as an alien or a pilgrim in his country. Still, many Christians have written in the last few days they have come to think of themselves, for the first time, as aliens in their country, and they know they will soon be marginalized if they live loudly and proudly (and charitably) as who they are.

Notice that I’ve managed to avoid waxing judgmental about the Confederate battle flag, although Apple moved to banish Civil War games that show that flag in the context of Confederate soldiers actually going into battle. Well, let me add one point: The main flag fact about the South today, especially the small-town South, is not the Stars and Bars; it’s the Stars and Stripes seen everywhere in places public and private, commercial and residential. The Confederate flag, it goes without saying, is hardly at all and shouldn’t be at all a sign of some present-tense form of allegiance. That doesn’t mean Americans should be deprived of historical literacy just because one flag lost and even deserved to lose. And it shouldn’t be a thought crime to believe that Lee and Jackson were really great generals and even good (although certainly misguided) men.

Now all we need is for President Obama to apologize for flying the gay pride flag.

No, wait. I forgive him. Who says Old Life is angry?

Straights You can Live With

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

Since I’m on the road I am (all about meEEEE!) listening to more national public media than to sports talk radio. That means I have heard a lot about how the United States took three big steps forward this past week. The Confederate Flag is now a disgrace. Government health insurance survived and millions of Americans are on the way to better lives. And gay marriage is now legal everywhere in the United States. I wonder if those who think all this shows the United States is headed in the right direction know where this progressive road is going. A world free of prejudice and filled with equality and justice? Isn’t that kind of like heaven? Meanwhile, the most vociferous opponents think at least Friday’s decision about gay marriage proves the United States is on the road to hell (which of course it is and always has been since only the redeemed are on the road to heaven).

Meanwhile (as a different Dan) pointed out, Islamists yesterday pulled off three different attacks. The most gruesome may have been the assault in France that left a man beheaded.

I wonder how far the proponents of progress are willing to go. Do they really think that the folks who wave the Confederate Flag or those who worship in churches that won’t marry gays are as threatening to progress as Islamic terrorists? Or would they rather live with Crackers and Bible-Thumpers who may bark a lot but seldom bite? And when Jihad comes to the United States, are the married gay couples going to fight? Or might they need some help from their straight opponents?

Conversely, do the Christians who do cartwheels of terror over the news of militant Islam view gay activists as as threatening as married gay couples? Or might Christians not recognize certain shared civil assumptions among the proponents of gay marriage?

Either way, some Christian voices can be heard on NPR who are not shrill but defend the freedoms of Christians to follow their consciences.

The sky may be falling, but it’s only a drizzle in the United States.

States' Rights, States' Flags

Published on by D. G. Hart223 Comments

After crossing the eastern half of the country and listening to NPR for at least 10 per cent of it, you’d have thought that the Confederate Flag shot those AME church members in Charleston (though it sure did knock Laudato Si below the fold). Nothing about Dylann Roof and his family or background, nothing about the families of the victims, or about the congregation itself and how it is going to go on. Instead, aside from the escaped convicts in New York State, the media is all about stories related to taking the flag down.

I have long suspected that the Confederate Flag stood not for slavery or white supremacy but signified a form of protest resolutely American. Most Americans believe in limited government. Even proponents of big federal programs don’t want government infringing on civil liberties. So if you see a Confederate Flag in a dorm room window at the University of Michigan, which I have, my suspicion is that here is a mid-westerner who has chosen the flag of one political body that tried to resist the centralization of the federal government.

Many people do not view the flag so innocently. And I can well understand why African-Americans object to it. But I have trouble believing that the flag is a means for vindicating homicide or starting race wars. David Duke is not Dylann Roof who is not Robert L. Dabney.

At the same time, the Confederate Flag could hardly represent well the political conviction of states’ rights. It is one flag that stood for the 11 states that fought the North. Each of those southern states had their own flag. That is why I, as a states’ rightser, have always flown the state flags of our several residences. When we had only lived in four states, I would change the flag at each season — Massachusetts in the winter, Pennsylvania in the spring, Maryland in the summer, and Illinois in the fall. The flaw in this plan came when a funny and cynical friend told our neighbors during the First Iraq War that the red, white, black, and gold flag we flew in the summer was the Iraqi flag.

But if you do want to show your loyalty to states, we have 50 options. And almost 48 of them communicate nothing offensive to the descendants of American slaves.

Women

Published on by D. G. Hart51 Comments

My father may have had problems with the post about same-sex marriage, but my mother, Ellen, who was born on this day in 1923, would appreciate H. L. Mencken’s view of marriage (minus the cocktails):

Every man, I daresay, has his own notion of what constitutes perfect peace and contentment, but all of those notions, despite the fundamental conflict of the sexes, revolve around women. As for me — and I hope I may be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for intruding my own personality–I reject the two commonest of them: passion, at least in its more adventurous and melodramatic aspects, is too exciting and alarming for so indolent a man, and I am too egoistic to have much desire to be mothered. What, then, remains for me? Let me try to describe it to you.

It is the close of a busy and vexatious day–say half past five or six o’clock of a winter afternoon. I have had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in front of a fire, smoking. At the edge of the divan, close enough for me to reach her with my hand, sits a woman not too young, but still good-looking and well-dressed–above all, a woman with a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks–of anything, everything, all the things that women talk of: books, music, the play, men, other women. No politics. No business. No religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious–but remember, she is intelligent; what she says is clearly expressed, and often picturesquely. I observe the fine sheen of her hair, the pretty cut of her frock, the glint of her white teeth, the arch of her eye-brow, the graceful curve of her arm. I listen to the exquisite murmur of her voice. Gradually I fall asleep–but only for an instant. At once, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I am awake. Then to sleep again–slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of dreams. And then awake again, and then asleep again, and so on.

I ask you seriously: could anything be more unutterably beautiful? (In Defense of Women, 207-208)

Birthdays

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

Picking up on yesterday’s reflections, what if my father were alive to read the post about same-sex marriage?

Chances are he wouldn’t have read it. I don’t think he or my mother ever owned a computer.

But what if I read the post to him? My sense is that he would have did what he did most of the time. He would have listened, asked a few questions, and maybe even asked me for something more to read about the subject. If my mother were in the room, my father would have been pleading with her — not always the most open-minded of people — not to become too upset at the boy.

And so I live with this odd sense of being one part my father when it comes to the culture war stuff, and one part my mother when it comes to the Lord’s Day and worship stuff. Call me conflicted.

And also call me despondent at least for today because this would be Jay Hart’s birthday if he were still alive. I know some celebrate June 11 as the birthday of the OPC. But fourteen years before the OPC started its ministry, my dad was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania among the Pennsylvania Germans who, thanks to the great war, became the Pennsylvania Dutch.

As much as I don’t think my father would have minded my questions from yesterday, I know he would have objected to yesterday’s Phillies’ game. So glad he doesn’t have to endure this season.

What Blogs Do

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

They resemble what Paul did in Jerusalem.

Now when Paul perceived that one part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, “Brothers, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees. It is with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead that I am on trial.” And when he had said this, a dissension arose between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all. Then a great clamor arose, and some of the scribes of the Pharisees’ party stood up and contended sharply, “We find nothing wrong in this man. What if a spirit or an angel spoke to him?” And when the dissension became violent, the tribune, afraid that Paul would be torn to pieces by them, commanded the soldiers to go down and take him away from among them by force and bring him into the barracks. (Acts 23:6-10 ESV)

They wind people up.

Ben Carson vs. Martin O'Malley — Please

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

This story about the faith of presidential candidates leads me to propose an alternative. First, a glimpse of the article:

This season’s crop of presidential candidates reflects this country’s many contradictions in faith. A minority of them have stuck with their first church. Hillary Clinton has always been a devout Methodist—her only conversion was from Goldwater Girl to ’60s liberal under the tutelage of her suburban Chicago pastor, Don Jones, who took his youth group to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and minister, has never strayed from his Baptist roots—his latest book is called God, Guns, Grits and Gravy. Santorum has always been Catholic; he tells Newsweek his faith was invigorated while he was in the Senate, owing to factors like his parish priest in Northern Virginia, his experiences of fellowship in the Bible Study Group in the Senate and his wife’s deep faith.

Ben Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon, hews closely to Seventh-day Adventist teachings, which include observing the Sabbath on Saturday and a literal belief in creationism. (He allows that Earth may have been formed over six “periods,” but insists that however long it took, it was God and not a Darwinian struggle that made us who we are.) Carson says his faith strengthened when he had an epiphany as a teenager that took him off a path he believed was headed to prison and onto one that made him the pride of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. (He’s famous for pioneering an operation to separate twins joined at the back of the head.)

The alternative is an all The-Wire 2016 presidential contest. Many know that Martin O’Malley, the basis for Tommy Carcetti, the white mayor elected in the fourth season, announced his entrance into the Democratic primaries. If only because I hope O’Malley’s presidency might inspire David Simon to do a The-Wire version of West Wing, I am going to vote for O’Malley should he gain the nomination. But I also will be pulling for Ben Carson. The reason is that the African-American public school students featured in season four — which my wife and I just finished for the ?? time — mention Carson at least twice as the person they want to be when they grow up. And that was a decade ago.

Plus, could the timing be any better for the release of a religious biography of Baltimore’s greatest writer?

Why Larry Sanders Is Brilliant

Published on by D. G. Hart54 Comments

John Fea is sad to see David Letterman go. I am too, even though I haven’t watched late night television for a long time. I am equally sad to see a younger generation of Americans (as in my students) with no familiarity with late night talk shows. When I was a kid, getting to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson was a chance to take a peek at the world of adults — not in the x-rated sense but one that conjured a world of references and people and ideas that seemed important and well beyond a child’s imaginative range.

Late night talk shows are incredibly predictable in format but almost every effort to improve or change them has been a flop. Fea quotes from a piece that describes the success of the talk show:

Talk — relatively spontaneous, genuine, unrehearsed conversation — was, of course, the main point of the genre when the “Tonight Show” was pioneered by Steve Allen back in 1954, redefined by Jack Paar when he took the helm in 1957, and turned into a national institution by Johnny Carson in the ’60s and ’70s. Here was a place where show-business celebrities could drop at least some of their public persona and give us a glimpse of what they were “really” like. Sure, that glimpse was always a little stage-managed — the conversational topics screened, the anecdotes carefully baked. But those nightly sessions on the “Tonight Show” guest couch were a relaxed, human-scale refuge in a hype-filled showbiz world.

And this is what makes the Larry Sanders Show brilliant — that is, the HBO series that Garry Shandling made about late night talk shows, one part homage, one part mocumentary. Since the show within the show was going to have Larry Sanders, the fictional host, interviewing and hosting guest stars, Shandling had to decide whether the guests were also going to be fictional like Larry and Hank (the Ed McMahon figure), or whether they were going to be real. Shandling decided to have the guest stars “play” themselves. So when Alec Baldwin comes on, he is playing himself.

And that points to part of the shows genius. Is Baldwin playing himself? Is he being Alec? Or is he presenting Alec Baldwin as something other than himself? For non-baby boomers this might be way too much irony. But for fans of Letterman, who made self-awareness and irony part and parcel of his show — mocking the talk show format, mugging before the camera, bringing stage personnel into the show — Sanders brought even more attention to the unique dynamics of a show that the networks cannot abandon even if younger viewers aren’t watching.