Page 2412 – Christianity Today (2024)

CT news has been keeping a journalistic eye on the Reader’s Digest Association for months now due to the association’s growing financial problems and its close ties to Saddleback’s Rick Warren, editor in chief of RDA’s Purpose Driven Connection, soon to release its third print edition.

Today, RDA announced…

[It] has reached an agreement in principle with a majority of its senior secured lenders on the terms of a restructuring plan to significantly reduce its debt burden and strengthen the company financially for the future. The restructuring agreement provides that the company’s senior secured lenders will exchange a substantial portion of the company’s $1.6 billion in senior secured debt for equity and provides for a transfer of ownership of the company to the lender group.

The company has elected not to make a $27 million interest payment due today on its 9 percent Senior Subordinated Notes due 2017. Instead, the company is using the 30-day grace period available on the interest payment to continue discussions with its lender group and other stakeholders regarding the terms of final documentation and to gain additional support for the consensual de-leveraging transaction. Use of the 30-day grace period does not constitute a default that permits acceleration of the Senior Subordinated Notes or any other indebtedness. In addition, RDA continues to be in compliance with its financial covenants. The company’s business operations remain strong, with anticipated Fiscal 2009 revenue declines (not yet reported) in the low single digits, currency neutral, despite the global recession.

The press statement did not discuss details about individual media titles. But it did indicate the following:

Mary Berner, RDA’s President and Chief Executive Officer, said the company will continue to operate normally throughout the restructuring process. “This agreement in principle with our lenders follows months of intensive strategic review of our balance-sheet issues to financially strengthen the company,” she said. “We are gratified to have this support from our secured lender group. The company has strong brands and products, a leadership position in many markets around the world and a solid plan for the future. Restructuring our debt will enable us to have the financial flexibility to move ahead with our growth and transformational initiatives.”

Without reading too much between the lines, these comments from CEO Berner suggest that Purpose Driven Connection will remain central to RDA’s “transformational initiatives.”

I know, indeed, the evil of that I purpose; but my inclination gets the better of my judgment.” Euripides, as quoted in the opening of Gordon Jennings’ technical article in the July 1959 issue of Road and Track magazine, entitled “Let’s Not Hop It Up.”[1] Jennings cautioned against amateur modification of automobile engines. Fifty years later, we are blessed with The Business of Speed, by David Lucsko, a history of the automotive aftermarket performance industry. Lucsko’s book, the latest installment in the John Hopkins University Press History of Technology series, provides us with a massively researched scholarly history of this industry, which now generates more than $30 billion in annual revenue.

Lucsko’s 65 pages of endnotes alone offer a treasure trove of historical information, and are more than enough to draw in the most pragmatic student of hot rodding history. Abiding personal interest in the automotive world propelled Lucsko to his current roles as an instructor of technological history at the University of Detroit Mercy and managing editor of Technology and Culture, the quarterly journal of the international Society for the History of Technology. We learn early on that the author, at least for much of his life, has pursued his automotive passion while seemingly heeding the message presented by the Euripides-quoting assistant technical editor Jennings a half century ago. This has not, however, dulled Lucsko’s fascination with the performance industry, its relationship to the mass-production automotive industry, some facets of the professional racing industry, and their roles in society.

We are given very specific examples of early aftermarket product developers, their products, and something of their approach to marketing and product development, but very little information on engineering and technical data. Numerous in-depth interviews with key 20th-century industry figures give insights into the part these men and their companies played in the history of this technology.

The roots and early history of SEMA—founded in 1963 as the Speed Equipment Manufacturers Association, later rebadged as the politically correct Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association, then morphed to the Specialty Equipment Market Association—are excellently presented. Lucsko provides an overview of the aftermarket manufacturers’ interaction (via the sema tech crew) with federal and state governmental bodies during the initial decades (the mid-1960s into the 1970s) of modern development of vehicle safety and emission control standards.

In a smoothly paced, highly accessible narrative, Lucsko introduces Holly Hedrich, Don Prieto, and others who worked tirelessly to demonstrate to government regulators the value of performance-oriented products. Their task was not always easy. The early SEMA technical crew was faced with some in government demanding that all non-original equipment specification automotive components be permanently banned. At this point, numerous aftermarket performance companies such as Edelbrock had products in development and already on the roads of America that greatly improved performance AND reduced fuel consumption and pollutant emissions. In the early ’70s, I took a short drive in one of the SEMA test vehicles. With a minimum of bolt-on aftermarket parts, it achieved a 20 percent increase in horsepower in the useful engine speed range, a 15 percent improvement in fuel consumption, and significantly reduced emissions. Holly Hedrich, sitting beside me, was nearly shedding tears of frustration over the bureaucratic battles he and a select few enthusiasts were facing. Lucsko has succeeded in presenting this curious, little-known sequence of events.

The 1973 oil embargo did, at least, provoke greatly increased awareness of the need to pursue application of technology for improved fuel mileage. The history of government standards for pollution control and vehicle safety is significant for us all, and Lucsko, alas, fails to do justice to that subject, which bears directly on his narrative. The primary reason for the existence of the aftermarket performance industry is quite clear: mass production of millions of cars per year is by necessity an exercise in compromise. Think for a moment just of the historical design process for many an American production vehicle engine: “Packaging” was of higher priority than any significant degree of performance, the term “performance” here including vehicle fuel mileage and pollution control. In order to install said engine with minimal modification in literally dozens of different model cars, the intake system, including carburetor/fuel injection/intake manifolding, was designed not for low fuel consumption or high performance but above all to fit under a variety of hoods and into a highly diverse group of engine compartments.

Indeed, from the early days of the automotive industry, independent high performance and racing entrepreneurs have contributed greatly to the technology of our everyday cars and trucks, through oft-secret consulting contracts and through natural trickle-down or outright theft of design components. As a case in point, consider the contributions of one performance industry leader. Gale Banks, founder and owner of Banks Engineering in Azusa, California, and associated companies, was first contracted by General Motors as an outside engineering consultant in 1969. Since that time he has provided expertise to Ford and Chrysler Corporation as well as stints including teaching engineering seminars for gm. Perhaps the world’s leading expert on development of turbocharging applications (yes Audi, you heard us) for race, performance, and production vehicles, Banks has contributed directly to the development of numerous mass-produced designs, and some of the world’s finest aftermarket products to further enhance vehicle performance.

The SEMA boys did their duty, and the performance aftermarket has been a pivotal player in the research and development of technology for the mass-production automotive industry at a very significant level ever since. The 2005 president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, Ted Robertson, declared that two-thirds of all innovation in production vehicles is now provided by vehicle component suppliers.[2] This is particularly significant in that, before his retirement, Robertson was the chief engineer of GM.

The American automobile industry is currently under elevated scrutiny, for good reason. But despite the pleasures of unbridled rants such as Peter De Lorenzo’s often amusing, highly insightful The United States of Toyota,[3] we want something more judicious from historians. Lucsko wisely resists joining those who condemn the industry for not drawing many of the independent performance industry leaders fully into their corporate structures—that dog just won’t hunt. These men are a force of nature, and no corporate structure is big enough for half a dozen of them.

At the fiftieth annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology last October, President Steven Usselman gave an outstanding address entitled “The Historian of Technology and Her True Country,” inspired by his consideration of the short story– writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor.[4] Usselman suggested that, “like novelists, historians must immerse themselves in the manners and customs of a time and place, in hopes they might glimpse something of the larger mystery of human affairs.” Lucsko has done so with The Business of Speed, and we are in his debt.

Rick Wilson is a special ed teacher and a coach at a K-8 school in Northern California. His direct involvement in the automotive world dates to the 1960s. Thanks to the genius of Doug Robinson, he currently holds a share in a Bonneville land speed record (D/GR, 218.412 MPH). Current front-burner projects: ’53 Studebaker land speed fuel coupe; ’70 Lenham GT vintage sports car. Daily driver: highly modified late-model Mini-Cooper S.

1. Road and Track, Vol. 10, No. 11 (July 1959), pp. 20-1, 72-3.

2. Robert C. Post, The SAE Story: One Hundred Years of Mobility (Tehabi Books, 2005), p. 15.

3. Peter M. De Lorenzo, The United States of Toyota (Inkwater Press, 2007).

4. Steven W. Usselman, “The Historian of Technology and Her True Country,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2009), p. 113.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In the early 1990s, Phil Vischer and his Big Idea Productions carefully watched the developing trends in family entertainment. This culture-watching led to the enormously successful home video series VeggieTales. But shortly after releasing its first feature film, Jonah, Big Idea declared bankruptcy and sold all its assets to Classic Media LLC. Since then, Vischer has written Me, Myself and Bob (Thomas Nelson), about the faith lessons of Big Idea’s collapse, and has returned to watching cultural and technological trends to discover how to best help Christian parents in this much-changed media landscape.

Can you watch Jonah now knowing all that happened afterward?

No, it’s pretty messed up. We laid off half the studio the morning after our premiere party. I don’t know if you could soil a memory more than that. It was brutal.

When I watch the movie now, I can smell my ambition—the drive to do as much as I could with Big Idea as fast as I could. We were in financial trouble actually before we went into production. The movie became about me wanting God to put a stamp of approval on my ambition. And he didn’t. He declined my invitation. Sometimes the best way to grow is to lose and to fail—dramatically and publicly.

Before Big Idea was sold, you wrote the second VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. It was made and released by the new owners in 2008. But a major thing in Christian film happened between the two VeggieTales films—The Passion of the Christ. How did that change Hollywood?

It’s a different world. So many doors are open. It’s very easy to pitch your idea thanks to Passion. The new Big Idea owners invited me to come to L.A. to pitch the story of The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything to Universal. (I was working on contract for Big Idea as a writer and voice talent.) Doing that pitch was bizarre because three years earlier, we couldn’t get any of the majors to show any interest in Jonah. That was pre-Passion. In fact, when I got to Universal for Pirates, there were 15 executives in the room to hear the pitch. One commented, “We didn’t get this many people together to take the King Kong pitch!”

After I walked them though the whole story, the head of marketing says, “That’s really great. But, do you think it’s Christian enough? Because if it needs to be more Christian, we’re fine with that.”

I thought, What alternate universe did I just wake up in? It’s a very strange world in the sense that everyone in Hollywood is looking for Christian movies.

However, no one knows what a Christian movie is. This confusion has created a cottage industry of Christian experts working on behalf of studios to help them find Christian movies or help them figure out how to make Christians come to their movies. It’s like Hollywood discovering that Lithuanian movies are wildly popular—but no one in Hollywood speaks Lithuanian. So, suddenly there’s an industry of Lithuanian translators who watch movies and tell Hollywood if they are any good. Right now, we have people making a decent living telling studios, “Oh, this is a good Christian movie and here’s how to get it to them.” It’s a bizarre time.

Were you tempted to add more overt God content in Pirates after Universal said you could?

I was trying to build a parable for the Christian life in a little movie about three lazy pirates. Because it’s a parable, I couldn’t have a literal God. When Jesus told the parable about the vineyard owner, he didn’t mention God because he was already there metaphorically. When you’re in Narnia, you cannot talk about Jesus because you’re living in allegory.

What do success stories like Passion, the first Narnia film, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy tell evangelicals about making successful films?

I’ve learned the hard way that movies are not a great teaching medium. If you want to engage people emotionally, great—but you can’t ever turn to the camera and say, “Now I have three points I want to make about parenting.” You can do that on TV. Sesame Street does that. Dora the Explorer does that every day and nobody says, “That’s not filmmaking! That’s didactic!” The difference is that people do not go to the movies to be preached at. That’s the bottom line. The more you preach, the fewer you reach. What frustrates me with the film business is how much time, energy, and money you have to spend to have the opportunity for two sentences of real transparent meaning.

The Passion was such an anomaly; you really can’t use it to learn much of anything about the nature of film. You had the most popular film actor in the world making a deeply personal work of art about a religious story. What are the odds of that happening again?

The movies inspired by the Narnia stories and the Lord of the Rings are also tough test cases. How many Narnias are there? How easy is it to come up with another Lord of the Rings? It’s not.There’s Tolkien and Lewis and then everybody else. Besides, Narnia had a 50-year history of engagement with fans—and a grandfather-clause evangelical exception for the use of fantasy and magic. You can’t get away with that today. Now, if we go to another fantasy world, we need to find Jesus there—literally.

That is why for some evangelicals, the Harry Potter books are seen as being straight from the pit. Even if Rowling says she’s employing Christian themes, forget it. How do you write a Christian fantasy today? I have no idea. I don’t know that you can. I think we’ve killed it. I think we are so concerned with how oppressed our worldview is and so defensive that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. And thus, we can’t tell the kind of stories that Lewis or Chesterton would have told to share the gospel. It’s kind of depressing, frankly.

After Big Idea was sold, you started Jellyfish Labs, an idea incubator. What was the goal?

We wanted to go back to being like Big Idea Productions in 1993—when we were just looking at trends. Back then, that led directly to VeggieTales. Now, it has led us to launch JellyTelly (JellyTelly.com), which is a seed planted online for a Christian Nickelodeon.

We need some way to interact with kids on a daily basis. With VeggieTales, even at our peak, we were telling two stories a year. The average American kid is consuming about 5 hours of media a day—including more than 3 hours of TV. So, telling two stories a year is not helping parents as much as they need to be helped.

Instead, we want to be there every day—like Mr. Rodgers was—and say: “Good morning, kids, here’s what we’re gonna learn today.” Even if it’s just for a half hour a day, we could have a huge impact by taking them out of the Hollywood media stream.

Kids consume media in so many ways. Some have assumed that tv is dying because of all the other growing media. But tv consumption has held steady for five years. Instead of being replaced, it’s merely being augmented by all these other options, and media consumption is rising. So, we need to be on tv. What’s the best way to get there? Sony rolled out their new line of tvs, and they all have internet ports on the back. All entertainment is becoming data. In ten years, the internet will be how all data is transmitted—whether you access it on your tv, laptop, or iPod is irrelevant.

As Christians, we need to be platform agnostic: “No, I am not in the tv business or the internet business. I am in the content business.” We need to get our content out in as many ways as possible: iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, Comcast Video on Demand, etc. There are so many ways to transmit storytelling and teaching into a household, you can’t say there is one way. They are all how we can reach people. It’s an interesting and quite tumultuous time in media.

What is driving you now as you develop JellyTelly?

According to one study, half of Christian kids raised in the church are walking away from their faith after high school. We are not doing a good job passing our faith on to our kids. A big part of the problem is that no one passed it on to us very well. We have a generation of parents who don’t know their faith either. Gallup looked at data a few years ago and found that half of adult Protestants can’t define the word grace, much less live it out. They don’t even know what it means.

I learned my numbers watching Sesame Street. We need to do the same thing in Christian homes today—writing little songs about grace and forgiveness. Let’s teach church history. Let’s bring biblical literacy to life so we can raise a generation of Christians who actually know what they believe. Let’s put flesh on theology for kids the way that Sesame Street brought literacy to life.

The world of entertainment is splitting into two directions: 1) The ultra-high end. This includes the $200-million films like Iron Man and the Pixar productions, which are becoming more and more common. 2) The ultra-low end. This is everything from YouTube videos to the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network to $10,000-per-episode reality TV shows. What’s dying is the middle. What was once the bulk of the industry—prime-time television and high-end kids’ shows—is just withering because the economics don’t work anymore. So what we’re looking at is not how Christians can make $200-million movies—I’m not sure that is a viable pursuit—but how can we be in the daily flow of ideas. No longer is the plan to work five years to tell one story with all the resources of a small Asian country.

Todd Hertz is a film critic for ChristianityTodayMovies.com and a freelance writer.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Most pastors don’t waste enough time.

At least that’s my conviction. But wasting time well is an acquired skill, because there is good wasting and there is bad wasting. Bad time wasting is the hang around/watch TV/perform random online search kind that leaves you with less life than you started with. You may be doing it right now. I don’t need to say any more about that, except to stop.

The good kind of time-wasting will actually lead you to be more connected with God and more full of life. But it’s hard to engage in, because there are always more pressing matters. This isn’t really wasting time, of course, but our culture makes it feel as though it is.

There are three categories for these well-wasted times.

1. The discipline of solitude. I used to think that solitude would involve pure, unadulterated prayer and intense spiritual activity; and because it is not, I never do solitude without a sense of wasting time. I have learned that wasting time is fundamental to solitude. People often want to know what you’re supposed to do when you go into solitude. But this is the wrong question. The point of solitude is what you don’t do.

Spiritual disciplines can be categorized as practices of abstinence and practices of engagement. In abstinence I refrain from doing what I normally do. In engagement I practice what I normally do not do.

Solitude is essentially a discipline of abstinence. In solitude I withdraw from relationships and noise and stimulation and see what there is when I am alone with God. The point of solitude is not what I do—it is what I don’t do. I get away from all the voices and demands of my life and find out about what my little life is like when all the distractions are removed.

The primary gift I find in solitude is freedom. After time alone, I begin to remember that what other people think of me really matters very little. Those people all have their own lives; they will all die one day and take their applause and criticisms with them. I’m always aware of this, but in solitude I come to feel it deeply. I feel a sense of peace that I treasure. A Bible or a journal may be fine for solitude, but they are not necessary. The primary thing to remember about solitude is just don’t do anything.

(Interestingly enough, the Sabbath was described in Exodus in terms of “not-doing”— “on it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals … “)

2. Musing. A second form of time-wasting is musing, or listening. Here I bring before God what I am concerned about. Often for me it involves either family or ministry. I am worried about one of my children. I am concerned about the health of my team. I am unsure about whether our ministry is functioning well.

I spread these out before God, and then I listen. This listening is a form of prayer, but it is prayer than involves thinking and imagination and asking questions. Often I will ask God at the beginning of it for wisdom regarding next steps to take. I might write some ideas down. It will often lead to plans.

It’s important not to mix up solitude as a discipline with planning or musing. When I plan, I am hoping for an outcome. But by its nature, solitude as a practice requires letting go of all outcomes. When I am engaging in solitude for God’s sake, I am not trying to get anything out of it; the pressure of wanting something keeps me from the very freedom God wants to give. But when I am musing over a concern, I am very much hoping for some next step to take.

3. Production enhancement. The best example of this third kind of time wasting is a cow. A cow is a miracle on four legs, producing milk that fuels all kinds of people. But if you look carefully at a cow through the day, it looks remarkably unproductive. It spends hours chewing and then re-chewing. It takes less than five minutes to download the milk that it took 24 hours to produce.

But when you’re creating milk, you just can’t make it go any faster. There are limits in the creativity game.

If you are going to create, you need some time to chew the grass and stare into space.

In my experience, the more creative people are, the more space-staring they need to do. You can make instant coffee. But milk takes time.

For me, production-enhancement time wasting usually involves some activity that I love just for its own sake. I read history. I go to the ocean and stare at the waves. I do a crossword puzzle. I call up a friend. I put a fire in the fire pit outside. I play the piano.

How do you waste time badly? How do you waste time well? Are you wasting time adequately? If you find yourself feeling inwardly free, if you find yourself with all the ideas you need for planning, if you find yourself in a creative ferment, then you should probably stick to your current schedule. If not, you might want to re-think how you’re wasting time.

Enough for today; time to go back to work.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Dear Josh,

I’m writing to thank you for your reaction to the events of last week—namely your comments in the wake of those, er, compromising pictures of you that surfaced on Deadspin.com.

In the midst of a summer of stories about one NFL player shooting himself in the thigh, another taking a life while driving intoxicated, a former NFL star leaving the joint after serving two years for dog fighting, and many of your baseball colleagues going down amid steroid-related allegations, your indiscretion seems, by comparison, tame (though a breach of marital trust is still a big deal—more on that later). Your biggest mistake seems to have been Partying While Christian.

The fact that you have been outspoken about your faith drew the ire of the snark-slinging Deadspin.com fraternity. Let me say this—neither of us are even remotely cool enough to begin to comment on anything that happens on Deadspin.com, which has become something of a sarcastic haven for Too Cool for School sports fans. In their mind you’re hopelessly hypocritical and I’m an even worse monster—a conservative, church-loving fundamentalist Christian; I’m Ned Flanders with a press pass. They’re seeing blood in the water (you) and doing what they’re paid to do, which is rip you to shreds.

Anyway. Back to Partying While Christian. What the Deadspin crowd fails to appreciate about your situation is that in its aftermath, you demonstrated Christian virtues of humility and repentance. Your willingness to atone publicly for your sins, acknowledging what you did wrong and a desire to change, sets a great example for sports fans everywhere—Christian or not. In an era when PR-department-generated “sports apologies” usually range from lying, at worst, to just sort of evasive and weak, at best, your apology is a bright light. And the way you’ve turned your life around—overcoming your addictions to drugs and alcohol while giving your life to Christ—is still an inspiration to millions.

A word to the evangelicals who feel somehow let down or ripped off by your mistake: Don’t. To put it simply, there is a speck in your eye and a plank in mine. It’s just that your speck ended up all over the Internet because of what you do for a living. As a young(ish) husband and father myself, I’m sad about what you did and the pain it caused your family, and my prayer is that God would honor your desire to remain clean and move forward. But far be it from me to cast the first stone. Our lives are more complicated than any glossy, 800-word Christian Athletes Are Great! puff piece could even begin to capture. I know because I’ve written some of those puff pieces. Your recent indiscretion is a reminder that even our best role models will sometimes stumble, but can remain role models nonetheless.

So keep hitting baseballs, cognizant of the fact that by the time this story runs there will be somebody else’s blood in the Internet water. Some other bar fight, co*ke bust, failed class, or DUI. This isn’t great but it’s the world we live in. And know that there are Christians who are proud of you—proud of the courage it took to own up, and proud of your desire to live a holy life and grow in sanctification.

Appreciatively,

Ted Kluck

“An Open Letter To … ” is a sports commentary at CT online. Ted Kluck‘s work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, and he’s a winner of a 2009 CT Book Award for Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be). Ted lives in Grand Ledge, Michigan, with his wife Kristin and son Tristan.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Previous sports columns by Ted Kluck include:

An Open Letter to Terrell Owens | Your VH1 reality show is intriguing, but dude, your ego is outta control. (August 11, 2009)

An Open Letter to ESPN the Magazine | Regarding your plans to one-up Sports Illustrated with a “no-clothes” issue … (July 28, 2009)

An Open Letter to Donte Stallworth | Concerning the overall public indignation about Michael Vick’s possible NFL reinstatement. (July 2, 2000)

An Open Letter to Brett Favre | There’s a season for everything, and for the great QB, now’s the time to stay retired. (July 14, 2009)

Christianity Today also has archives of “Play Ball,” an occasional department covering sports.

When 1,500 leaders and pastors gather October 1 and 2 for the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders’ (CONLAMIC) conference in Washington, D.C., boycotting the 2010 U.S. Census will top their agenda.

Unless Congress advances immigration reform during September, CONLAMIC chairman Miguel Rivera plans to expand last April’s call for undocumented immigrants to shun the census to all Latinos nationwide.

“When we started this action, our main moral position was, ‘We take care of our brethren,'” said Rivera, a pastor whose organization claims nearly 22,000 evangelical churches—with an estimated 38 percent of members undocumented.

Though most U.S. Hispanics agree that immigration reform is urgently needed, support for the boycott appears weak. Two other national Hispanic Christian groups oppose it. They cite the census’ impact on distribution of federal aid, which affects many Latino communities.

“Miguel has done great work on immigration, but I disagree totally with him on strategy,” said Luis Cortes Jr., pastor and president of Esperanza, a 12,000-member evangelical network that supported the census at its National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in June. “It breaks the law and asks people who are undocumented to compound that by breaking another law.”

Others agree. Jesse Miranda, executive director of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference—which represents 25,000 evangelical churches—sees participation in the census as a longstanding civic responsibility.

“We’re simply encouraging our churches to take part,” Miranda said. “It’s more an issue of education than a debate. As Christians, we want to comply with things we feel are right and proper.”

Though Rivera is aware that census data are confidential, his objection to the decennial count stems from “opportunistic politicians” who use resulting demographic information to promote anti-immigrant legislation.

“Because we have a broken immigration system, there is no way immigrants can fix their legal status,” Rivera said.

However, leaders say the disagreement doesn’t symbolize division within the Latino evangelical church. “We agree that we want immigration reform,” Cortes said. “This is just a tactic. We disagree on a tactic.”

Juan Martinez, associate dean for Fuller Theological Seminary’s Hispanic church studies department, agrees, saying the dispute reveals the diversity of Hispanic evangelicals.

Martinez said using one label for this group ignores its numerous ethnicities and disparate agendas.

And despite the media coverage in recent months, Martinez doesn’t think the discussion has moved to the forefront of the church’s consciousness.

“I have not heard it in the life of the church or in the conversations of local pastors,” he said. “It’s not an issue at that level.”

However, Gaston Espinosa, professor of religious studies at California’s Claremont McKenna College, thinks the boycott can gather steam if Rivera provides a stronger rationale.

“You could almost look at this as an attempt to keep President Obama and the Democrats accountable for their political promises,” Espinosa said. “Hispanic evangelicals clearly supported Obama in the last election, which was a reversal of what they had done [with Democrats] in 2004.”

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Christianity Today has a special section about immigration on our site, including:

The Soul of the Border Crisis | Local churches are key in fixing the immigration mess. (June 8, 2009)

What to Do with the Stranger? | Two evangelicals argue for more generous immigration policies. (May 11, 2009)

Interview: When the Stranger Knocks | The influx of immigrants to the U.S. means a new mission field for American evangelicals, says World Relief’s Jenny Hwang. (May 11, 2009)

See our news section and liveblog for more news updates.

When punk rockers grow up and get married in their forties, the celebration is bound to be a little different. The wedding reception was held upon the stage of a grand old theater in Buffalo, New York. Stylishly set tables with crisp white clothes and bright crystal were scattered across the wooden floor, with its stage markings and piles of ropes and velvet curtains swagged casually aside. We, the wedding guests, ate our wedding banquet up on that stage and looked out at hundreds of plush empty seats; we were a show with no audience.

On the stage full of tables there was a smaller stage for the wedding band. This was a revolving door of musicians who would get up from their guest tables at the appropriate song and wander up to join the band, for one number or maybe two. In between, one guitarist might hand her instrument to another, or a drummer might stand to make room for drummer number four of the evening. The lead singers changed as different wedding guests took their turn at the mic. Two decades of friendship and musical history crossed the stage that night, as musical memories drew us into a wedding banquet like no other.

Thankfully, this was not a karaoke affair, where amateurs torture one another with spur of the moment song choices and alcohol induced confidence, nearly always misplaced. No, this was a carefully choreographed set list that took experienced and gifted musicians from many bands and pulled them together in odd combinations.

Some of the musicians were former band mates now moved on to be lawyers and mothers and business people. But many of these wedding guests were still in the music business and playing in bands that record and play shows. Some had been in bands together that were now broken up and gathered into new combinations and adventures. But all of them wandered forward to perform and to celebrate the wedding of the bride, a singer, songwriter, guitar player, and punk rock music activist; and the groom, a journalist who loves music, thank God.

Ghost of Identity Past

As a minister, I have learned that wedding receptions reflect the best and worst of people’s pasts. Here the past and the present of the gathered community—the couple and their friends—was present in the venue itself, a huge theater. These were people who were comfortable on stages: either on them as performers, or in front of them as fans, or behind them, as crew, sound, and support. So to have the wedding celebration there was only natural. As natural as the bride taking her turn at the mic to sing a few numbers at her own wedding reception.

The Christian wedding ceremony had taken place in the theater’s lobby. That lobby was ornate, with nooks and crannies where guests sat on gilt chairs beautifully restored, as so many old American theaters have been in recent decades. The bride and groom had processed up a winding stair case to a high alcove where they could look down to see all their guests, who looked like elegantly dressed theater patrons frozen in the middle of intermission to look upwards at something remarkable—in this case the wedding.

There at the top of the stairs, I waited as the minister to perform my friend Jenny’s wedding. It had been more than 20 years since she and I first met in high school, and it had been 16 years since we had been locked inside another old theater, in another place and another time.

Sixteen years earlier, long before I was a performer of wedding ceremonies, I was a bass player in a punk rock band. Jenny was the singer, Derek played guitar, and Steve was on drums. Sixteen summers ago, we had been on tour. It was in some ways our first big break, a trek of several weeks and many shows across the United States, with two other bands: Seaweed from Seattle, and Super Chunk from Chapel Hill. Our band was called Geek. And this big tour would also be our last, for that was the summer before I started my masters of divinity degree at Yale Divinity School.

Not many bands can say that they broke up because the bass player went to seminary, but there you have it.

In the book of Revelation, a bride and groom appear as signs of what heaven may be, stretching our imaginations with an iconic image. “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2, NRSV). I thought of Jenny, coming up those bridal stairs so beautifully dressed, in a vintage-style white lace gown, her red hair cut into a soft bob, when 16 years ago it had been a wild mass of waist long dreadlocks.

In life, we are constantly moving back and forth in time, back and forth between what was and what is and what might be. But the writer of Revelation never lets you get stuck in one time zone. After the bride, come these words: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,’See, the home of God is among mortals'” (Rev. 21:3). God is right here in the middle of ordinary life, no matter where you are. Or where you were.

Sixteen years ago, in the weeks before divinity school, life had seemed very different.

Dancing to Spite Decay

The tour of the bands had started in Asheville, North Carolina, where drunken men had shouted at us to play softer so they could continue their conversation. But it’s hard to play electric guitars softly, particularly in our genre. The three men left the place annoyed, and we were left with no audience. But given that it was the first night of the tour, we were so excited that all three bands played full sets to a single bemused bartender.

The crowds picked up when we played in New York City at a famous club, where meaningful conversation was not on the agenda. But during that show, my car was broken into and all my clothes were stolen. That explains why in almost every picture from that summer, I am wearing the same tee shirt. It said “bagel eater,” and it was all I had to remember a New Yorker who gave it to me out of pity at 3 a.m. as I picked through the smashed glass from my windshield.

Later we drove to Madison, Wisconsin, where along the highway two guitars fell off the top of one of the cars, so that we had to turn all the vehicles around and search for wreckage on the other side. Remarkably we found them, still safe in their cases on the side of the road about forty-five minutes back. Losing all your clothes was one thing, but losing your guitars—that would be a disaster.

And finally came Flint, Michigan, where we gasped to discover our venue: an enormous old theater that seated thousands, right in the center of town. Could this be right?

Punk rockers didn’t usually play in venues that size. We played in crowded basem*nt clubs, with black walls and grottos that rarely had any actual seats. When we had to sleep—if we weren’t tripling up in the very cheapest motels, splitting Subway sandwiches and 7/11 burritos—we were on the sofas of fans we had never met before, and who politely inquired if we were vegan.

So for our motley caravan to pull up at this massive old theater was like the Beverly Hillbillies pulling up in their Appalachian jalopy at the California mansion. We could hardly believe this theater was for us.

Flint, Michigan, had fallen on hard times. Auto jobs had left the area, and the people struggled to support themselves on the industries that remained. This was about the time Michael Moore made the documentary Roger and Me, about corporate greed and the decline of that city.

As we got closer, we saw that the theater was clearly in bad shape. Seeing our bands’ names on the marquee had been exciting, but thick chains on the main doors did not bode well. We saw people waiting to see us at a side door and we were ushered in there, not to the theater, but to the lobby, which had been set up with a few folding chairs, electrical outlets, and a stench that indicated no cleaning in years. The lobby was our venue. As for the main theater, we were told it had been condemned.

So poor were the kids in Flint, Michigan, that many of them could not afford the show. So they listened from outside, until we insisted they just come in. There were no hotels around. No one invited us over to their house that night. When it was time to sleep, we were told we were staying in the old theater.

Apparently this was how they handled hospitality for all the bands. They simply turned off the lights and locked you inside.

We did not sleep easy that night. Some of us settled near the lobby door, at least wanting to see who might burst in from the street, as we imagined our appropriately edgy end. (Killed in a condemned theater in Flint, Michigan? Sad, yes. But that’s so punk rock.) The optimists snuck into the condemned theater itself, and ran around on the main stage, dancing, singing and imagining an audience in the dark and grim decay.

“I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away'” (Rev. 21:3-4, NRSV).

It was that vision that would call me to leave this life and pursue another, and yet still sense God in the one I had left behind. In the midst of a depressed city, artists danced around on a stage condemned with all the joy that musicians can bring to an impossible situation. In music, we transcend reality. In music, we imagine a better world. It’s also what we do in the life of faith. We imagine in an empty condemned theater a show that will rock the world.

A Journey of Beginnings

When I arrived at Yale Divinity School a few weeks later, I had no idea what to expect, only that it would be different. And different it was. From the “bagel eater” tee shirt punk rock tour of America’s dirtiest places, I now found myself at the new student orientation picnic at Yale, on a little green surrounded by Georgian cloisters and peppy preppiness. We were being led in song by a throng of sincere, yet ultimately bad, guitar players. They were urging us to sing (I kid you not) “Kum Ba Yah.”

It was a like a Saturday Night Live skit of what seminary must be like. Think Revenge of the Nerds meets church camp.

I’ve made a horrible decision, I thought to myself. I’m surrounded by geeks, who will suck me into their geeky world, and I’ll never be cool again.

And I wasn’t.

Because, of course, part of following a calling is giving up stuff like that. I came to divinity school that summer carrying a boatful of ego and attitude and judgmentalism and insecurity (In other words, all the things that in the life of faith, Jesus calls us to work on). So naturally I left divinity school with the same list.

But my feelings from that first day of divinity school, my fear of giving up one self-image for another that’s equally shaky, stay with me as a rebuking gift. The haunting words, I’ll never be cool again, remind me today, as a pastor, how hard it is for people to step into our churches.

I remember to tell people what I always needed to hear myself, that when we enter into a community of faith, we’re not graduating; we’re matriculating. In the journey of faith, we don’t cross the finish line at the new members class or the seminary graduation or the installation at the new church. We are always merely beginning a new lap of a race. The throne is always out of reach (“You mean, we never were cool to begin with?”), which makes me particularly grateful for the reminder, “See, the home of God is among mortals.”

Sometimes your job is to keep the beat steady enough to allow others to shine. Other times you make it funky and add a needed surprise.

Back among mortals, 16 years after the band’s big tour, my own spiritual tour took me to a place I could never have imagined. Now I had the privilege of performing my old friend’s wedding, the lead singer of our band. Back in the days when we had been on that tour, the lines between cool and uncool seemed so much clearer, and what I was leaving to do put me into a social Siberia that made me wonder if I would ever see those music friends again. But today Jenny was in a white dress singing in her own wedding band and, on top of it all, she and her new husband had started attending church.

“So you’re a minister now?” someone said, adding words that sixteen years ago, I could not have imagined hearing. “That’s really cool.”

Sometimes in our lives, we think there are these breaks, these moments when we make a big change. We move to a new church, we make a move to a new denomination, we form a new relationship, or we pick a new path. But looking back, we were always playing the same song, just different variations, and in different combos.

From the stage at the wedding banquet, I thought about how being a bass player is a lot like being a minister. You lay down the beat, trying to keep it solid and true. Sometimes your job is to keep it steady enough to allow others to shine, to sing, to play, and to dance, as God wants us to. Other times, it’s the bass that makes it funky and adds a needed surprise. But the bass is just one part of the band, and alone, it doesn’t sound like much.

For people who are drawn to music, the mystery that draws us into the bands we love the most, is that we know it’s not just about the one. The notes and sounds come together, the different people play their roles, and yet what is produced transcends all that. It’s like when you become a member of the body of Christ—you join a band that is way better than you are, and the next tour is always just beginning.

Lillian Daniel is Senior Minister of First Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Adapted from This Odd & Wondrous Calling, © 2008 Lillian Daniel. Reprinted by permissionof Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

I’ve never had much of a desire to travel through time. Let’s just let the past, with all its mistakes and bad haircuts, stay in the past, I’ve always thought. Until now. As the ending credits of The Time Traveler’s Wife were rolling, I had a sudden urge to slip back a year or so to tell the film’s screenwriter and director that the fruit of their labor was going to frustrate audiences nationwide if they didn’t add a few more scenes early on.

But, sadly, no.

Instead The Time Traveler’s Wife starts with a car driving through a snowy, sleepy little town. There’s a mom in the front seat and what appears to be a girl in the backseat, until the mom calls the child Henry (see what I mean about those haircuts?). They’re singing Christmas songs together until their sedan looks like it’s going to smash head-on into a semi. But before it does, the boy slowly disappears.

We next see him a few yards and a few moments away, shaken and a bit scratched up, but fine. The car wreckage, which presumably still contains his mom, is smoking in the background. He’s talking to a man who tells him he’s a future version of himself and that everything’s going to be okay.

Then the grown-up Henry (Eric Bana) dissolves and reappears—naked—in the back stacks of a large Chicago library. There’s a pile of clothing nearby, which he quickly puts on before going back to his post at the desk to deliver a book to a patron.

His next customer is a young woman, Clare (Rachel McAdams), who recognizes him instantly, even though she’s a stranger to him. Clare convinces Henry to have dinner with her that night, where she tells him, “Your future is my past. For you, none of it has happened yet. But for me … I’ve known you since I was six.”

Um, what? you’re likely thinking.

Precisely.

In retrospect (and after reading the production notes), I realize the writers and directors were trying to give us, the audience, the disjointed feeling of time travel in the opening scenes of the film. But unfortunately, the effect is simply disjointed. And, I would tell the year-or-so-ago versions of the writer and director, we don’t show up to a movie like The Time Traveler’s Wife to experience time travel, we show up to experience a story. To meet compelling characters. To watch the magical process of them falling in love. And to see how they handle the requisite challenges they’ll face in our hour and a half journey with them.

Without the proper introductions, we aren’t invested in Henry and Clare. We don’t care about them or what happens to them. So the movie starts to feel like being thrust into the middle of a game without being told any of the rules or objectives. Or, perhaps even more fitting, it’s like an arranged marriage. Details first, emotion later.

So we don’t quite understand why Clare keeps staring all moony-eyed at Henry (other than the fact that he’s, you know, Eric Bana) throughout the film because we never really see them fall in love. Oh sure, we flash back to the meadow where six-year-old Clare is settling into a solo picnic only to be interrupted by a rustling in a nearby bush. Turns out it’s a naked man. She hands him her blanket, he says he’s from the future and that he’ll be back next Tuesday, then he disintegrates. It’s more odd than magical. We bounce back and forth throughout time and throughout their relationship for the rest of the film.

But we’re left with questions: Why does Henry travel through time? Why does everyone seem to just accept this? Why must he always arrive naked? How does he keep conveniently finding clothes exactly his size upon arrival? And, most importantly, why do Henry and Clare love each other?

What’s so frustrating about not having this last question explained (which, if done well, would have made us overlook all the other questions) is that this could have been a truly lovely film. It’s based on the 2003 bestselling and beloved book by Audrey Niffenegger. It stars the radiant Rachel McAdams, who positively shimmers through most of the movie. And Eric Bana, who, though somewhat lackluster here, does an apt job. These likeable stars are set in sumptuous scenes, creating almost picture-postcard-like images.

And there are intriguing themes to explore here. What would you say to a previous version of yourself? Would you play those winning lotto numbers? Do you really have free will if you’ve seen the future and know you can’t change it?

Most intriguing is watching a couple slip in and out of different time periods in their relationship. Henry disappears momentarily on his honeymoon night only to find himself on his second meeting with young Clare in that meadow. Years later, after a big fight, Clare is visited by a younger Henry, who hasn’t yet experienced the events that spurred their argument. It’s one thing to remember a first date decades into a marriage, it’s quite another to go back and experience it again. What an intriguing way to illustrate that all those experiences—good and bad, young and old, naïve and wise—are there, intermingled, in a life-long love.

By the end I was finally invested in Henry and Clare. I did care. But soon after, the credits started rolling and I was left wishing the good people behind The Time Traveler’s Wife had pulled me in about an hour and a half sooner. All the elements are there, just a bit too jumbled in time.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. If you could go back ten years in time and visit yourself, what would you say? If you could go back and relive one event in your life, what would it be? Would you do it differently, if you could?
2. How does the time travel impact Henry and Clare—individually and as a couple? What emotions does it stir in each of them? What sacrifices and concessions does it require? How do these emotions and sacrifices impact their relationship—both positively and negatively?
3. Discuss the role of free will in the film. Does it exist?
4. There are characters in The Time Traveler’s Wife who know about events in the future and those who don’t. How does the knowing or not knowing impact each character? Who’s better off?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Time Traveler’s Wife is rated PG-13 for thematic elements, brief disturbing images, nudity and sexuality. We see both Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams fully naked from behind. They sleep together after he’s known her about a day—and she’s kind of known him about 15 years. One character is seen naked and bleeding—from a gunshot wound—in a couple scenes. Two different childhood characters experience the death of a parent. Henry’s father has a drinking problem. And Henry keeps dissolving, which could be a disturbing image for younger viewers.

Photos © New Line Cinema

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In the films of Hayao Miyazaki, children often see things that the adults around them miss completely. It’s not that Miyazaki’s grown-ups have impaired vision, and it’s certainly not that they’re dim. It’s just that they can sometimes be so caught up in the hustle and bustle of busy, everyday life that they forget how to really look.

In much the same way, moviegoers who are too caught up in looking for the latest, newest, shiniest, flashiest blockbuster or Oscar warhorse are likely to miss out on Miyazaki’s cinematic miracles—movies that require a slightly different kind of viewing, moviegoing informed by patience and imagination and childlike wonder.

Ponyo is Miyazaki’s latest. It’s his first film since the weird and wonderful Howl’s Moving Castle, and his second since the trippy fantasia Spirited Away, which won him an Academy Award. It also happens to be released in the U.S. on (roughly) the tenth anniversary of his dark, violent epic, Princess Mononoke. But this movie isn’t much like any of those; it has more in common with the movies he made before he started making epics, small and magical movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service and especially My Neighbor Totoro. In other words, it’s not an epic or a war movie—it’s a fairy tale.

Actually, it’s been called Miyazaki’s own Little Mermaid, though the similarities are fairly superficial (as were comparisons between Spirited Away and Alice in Wonderland). The movie does involve a young girl born in an underwater world to a powerful wizard of the sea, and she does make contact with a human being. Beyond that … well, more on that later.

The girl, in this case, is Ponyo—and technically, she starts as a fish. She’s separated from her father (the Poseidan-like ocean warlock Fujimoto) and rescued by a five-year-old boy, Sosuke, who lives high on a cliff with his mother, Lisa, while his father is out at sea. He’s also the heart and soul of the movie—he cares for his orphaned fish with devotion and curiosity.

In fact, his love for Ponyo leaves such an impression on her that, even after she is returned to her father, she longs to be back with Ponyo—so much so that she harnesses the magic of the sea and transforms herself into a human being, very much to Fujimoto’s dismay. His daughter’s decision throws the natural order out of balance, and so a series of strange, cataclysmic events submerges Sosuke’s village in water and fills the seas with prehistoric marine life.

If it sounds weird, well, that’s Miyazaki for you. His last few movies have all veered into trippy, esoteric fantasy, where rules of logic and linear storytelling give way to the filmmaker’s own topsy-turvy laws of whimsy. So in Howl’s Moving Castle, for instance—and once again in Ponyo—it can be a little tough to figure out, cognitively, what actually happens in the final act. In Howl’s, I didn’t much care—the film was still engrossing and quite magical. In Ponyo, it’s a bit more of a problem—toward the end of the movie, Miyazaki turns his focus to larger-than-life scenarios involving rifts in the fabric of reality, cosmic tests of love and faithfulness, and ill-defined truces between supernatural beings.

It’s all pretty cool, at least to look at. It’s just that it strays from Miyazaki’s—and Ponyo‘s—greatest virtues. And make no mistake: For the majority of its run time, this movie is totally captivating, precisely because the director focuses on the little (and less abstract) things.

The film’s joys are numerous, and most of them are small and simple. To start with, the animation—all hand-drawn—is simply breathtaking, beautiful and impressionistic in a way that makes the artwork look, at times, like watercolor. In one scene, Miyazaki’s animators capture a brutal rainstorm in a way that’s more vivid and evocative than any tempestuous weather I’ve ever seen in a live-action movie.

And then there are the characters. Sosuke is immediately one of my favorite Miyazaki characters; he shows great love for his mother, encouraging her even when she has an argument with the boy’s father. His relationship with Lisa is one of the warmest, most intimate mother-child relationships seen at the movies in a good while.

And his relationship with Ponyo is just as delightful, in large part for what it represents for Miyazaki himself. The filmmaker has long addressed environmental concerns in his movies, and sometimes—as in Castle in the Sky—he can get awfully preachy. But there’s nothing didactic about Sosuke’s childlike curiosity toward the ocean at his doorstep, or his intrinsic devotion toward Ponyo. His relationship to his environment—as with his relationship to his family—is one of simple responsibility and devotion.

The relationships between the characters—that’s where the real magic happens. But even when Ponyo loses sight of this, it’s never anything less than enthralling, and at its best, it’s transportive, allowing us to see—however briefly—through the eyes of Sosuke. That’s Miyazaki’s true gift, and that’s why this film is a gift, available to anyone willing to look for it.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. How would you describe Sosuke’s relationship to his environment—and in particular, to Ponyo?
2. How would you describe the family dynamic between Sosuke, Lisa, and Koichi? Would you say they’re mostly a happy, healthy family?
3. What are the virtues that make Sosuke heroic?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Ponyo is rated G. There is a scene of a rainstorm that might be frightening for the very young, and there are some passing references to a goddess, spells and incantations, and other traces of the supernatural, but as always, Miyazaki doesn’t take these things too seriously; they’re simply plot elements in a very fantastic story.

Photos © Disney

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

With the end of summer in sight, your summer reading list is probably still untouched. If so, you are not alone. Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin wrote last week on “the lost art of reading,” in which he muses on his past as an avid lover of the printed word and wonders what happened to his craving for books.

Our attention-deficit-inducing era of video games, multi-tab browsers, and YouTube videos hasn’t been around that long. If you’re like Ulin, you might have grown up devouring books only to find yourself now reading this, wondering, When was the last time I didn’t have to remind myself to sit down and read? Ulin admits that “some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down,” and only then by forcing himself to stay focused. He writes:

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Ulin raises another question when he writes, “There is the fixity of the text, which doesn’t change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago.” When Ulin writes that “reading has become an act of meditation,” he is talking about text itself—any text. But as Christians, perhaps we ought to consider this as a matter of biblical importance. As Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” and so is the Bible as the written revelation of him. How difficult is it for Christians in the digital age to sit still and allow the unchanging Word of God to permeate what Ulin calls “the buzz … a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age”? Or, as Ulin put it, “How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?”

Alicia Cohn is an intern at Christianity Today magazine. She has written previous blog posts for Her.meneutics on marriage in Florida, the Breast Cancer Bible, and The Stoning of Soraya M.

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I’ve finished three of the six books on my summer reading list. Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry will probably most interest those who either take psychotropic drugs themselves or have loved ones who do.

The author, Edward Shorter, is a medical historian at the University of Toronto, but his book reads like investigative journalism. He explains how effective psychiatric medications were driven out of drugstores as the FDA asserted its power in the 1960s, and as concerns about “addiction” gained cultural dominance. This second point reminded me of renowned pain specialist Kathleen M. Foley’s work, in which she has dispelled misconceptions about pain management within the same cultural context. Shorter also explores how the diagnosis of depression came to replace anxiety as a primary description of general malaise. He says this change has less to do with science than with politics and expired patents. What he’d like to see is a revival in psychiatric research that leads to diagnosis and therapeutics shaped less by external pressures and more by intellectual rigor and precision. Here, here!

The second book I read this summer is Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by renowned religion sociologist Robert Bellah. This book, his most famous, nicely complemented Beyond Prozac in tracing and analyzing the advent of a therapeutic, individualistic approach to life in the U.S. Reading the self-perceptions of various interview subjects, I felt as if I was reading my own thoughts and those of my family and friends. Of these subjects, the authors generously conclude, “If there are vast numbers of a selfish, narcisstic ‘me’ generation in America, we did not find them, but we certainly did find that the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think.” This meme verges on passe at this point, but it bears reminding how we got where we are.

The third book is an antidote of sorts to the first two. So Brave, Young, and Handsome is veteran NPR reporter Leif Enger’s sophom*ore effort. Having enjoyed the characters, redemptive themes, and surprising supernatural elements in Peace Like a River, I hoped, if not for more of the same, at least for as much creativity. While this novel employs similar themes, it’s a slower, more subtly imaginative story. Enger uses the occasion of following up his first triumph as a wry framing tool in this work. Anticipating that readers like me will be hungry for particular scenes, Enger tips a hat to us, but doesn’t feed our hunger. This reveals both skill and humor, I think. Again, there’s a flight from the law, with salvation coming not only to the criminal but to other characters as well. It’ll be fun to see to how Enger uses his spare journalistic prose and rich storytelling in the future.

As to the other three books on my list, Honoring the Body by Stephanie Paulsell is on my nightstand, but I haven’t even ordered Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology and Spiritual Theology yet. With the end of summer fast approaching, I doubt I’ll get to these anytime soon. I’m really in the mood for another work of fiction. What suggestions do you have for a rich, engaging novel that I could find at a public library?