Greetings, friends!
We’re in the second week of November 2021 — who can believe it? At my house, students are in the final push before the end of the semester and registering for spring classes.
I’ve always been a snob about New England falls being the best falls (they are), but Charlotte’s gentle autumns have grown on me as we’ve lived here longer. It’s really nice having bright leaves on the trees in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. It tunes my heart to sing God’s praise.
Of course, the ideal scenario would be that they would all be off the trees by the day after Thanksgiving so that we can move on to decorating for Christmas without fall leaves around. Can this be arranged somehow?
Best wishes for a pleasant close to autumn.
The Part Where There’s an Essay:
Thought Trends in 2021
Recently I’ve been trying to put into words the thought trends that I see influencing the evangelical Christian church in 2021. There are more, not fewer, than this. As a writing exercise and to encourage dialogue, I’ve attempted to keep the definitions brief.
To be clear, I’ve seen each of these in my conversations with my various communities. They are not pulled from internet interactions with strangers. They are in play in the minds of my friends, family, and myself.
The Inner Ring
I recommend this essay to everyone I talk to about Lewis’ nonfiction. I read it yearly, and one time I wrote about how it showed up in the musical Hamilton. Lewis discusses here the tendency of all of us to enjoy being “on the inside,” -- to know things that others don’t know. Not only do we enjoy this “inner ring” for ourselves, but we also enjoy that others are on the outside. Once you are willing to admit this habit to yourself, you might see it more than you like.
it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.
What makes the Inner Ring attractive is mostly the fact that there’s a crowd outside it. If you’re the person on the inside, you can glory in what you know. You can feel good that you picked the right group. You might even hesitate to share what goes on inside the ring because you want to keep it exclusive.
One example of the Inner Ring is the exclusive knowledge people think that they are privy to. “You should read about this cure...this solution...this conspiracy....” they whisper. The internet has made experts of us all. Pride rears its ugly head again as people congratulate themselves on having figured out how to avoid or cure covid, using the all-powerful Google machine, plus friends’ anecdotes, in place of well-vetted scientific data.
This tendency is at the heart of Qanon. Adherents to this set of conspiracy theories believe that they have cracked a code of some sort, whether that code is concerning the election, the pandemic, or the “Deep State.” Part of the allure is that they have a secret set of knowledge. Lewis states, “When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself ‘all the sensible people at this place.’” This is what makes conversations with Qanon followers so difficult — it is an entirely different perception of reality.
The everyday problem becomes uglier as we take pleasure in seeing “the others” be defeated. I’ve seen liberals sneer at conservatives when a church has an outbreak. Conservatives laugh as a classroom with masks sees a case increase. And so it goes, without a care for those outside our ring. We care only for the victory of our Inner Ring.
What’s the cure for this? Well, start by reading the essay.
I’ll be back with another thought trend next week, and this one doesn’t have anything to do with CS Lewis (so far).
For the Anglophiles
A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a little British TV show called The Detectorists. It’s quiet, funny, and hopeful (available here on Amazon Prime). Ever since I watched that series, news items about metal detectorists (not metal detectors -- those are the machines) catch my eye. Here is a recent story about a huge discovery of a very tiny Bible near York.
Reads & Listens of the Week
The WSJ had an excellent piece on what “Clean Beauty” means nowadays. Imagine the pandemic if we were all getting drunk from hand sanitizer seeping into our bloodstreams.
Here’s a surprisingly optimistic interview with Ben Sasse in which he uses the term "chuckleheads." He has some good things to say about embodied life versus online life and cultivating habits for both.
A good many of my friends saw The Most Reluctant Convert film last week. I’m hoping to get to it before it’s out of theaters, as I enjoyed his stage show by the same name. I am a big fan of Max McLean. If you don’t know about his Fellowship for the Performing Arts, sign up for their newsletter here.
Episodes 480 and 481 of the Holy Post podcast were a one-two punch of greatness. I added a couple of books to my to-be-read list after listening.
Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness. - David Augsburger