As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I am reading the late Dr. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which the New York Times chose as one of its Ten Best Books of 2011. One of the things that has been so striking for me is how “in process” Malcolm X was.

Today I learned more about the strategy Malcolm was beginning to formulate and initiate in his final months. He was making overtures to mainstream civil rights leaders and his rhetoric was far less violent. Yet his approach to civil rights didn’t fit neatly into either of the two dominant camps at that time: separatism or integration. Instead, Malcolm X’s strategy was one of internationalism, connecting the struggle for civil rights for blacks in the United States to human rights struggles around the world. He even planned on going to the United Nations to lodge a formal protest against the United States. This was brilliant. I’m not saying I prefer it over Dr. King’s philosophy of integration, but it is a good example of the “mind at work” I talked about yesterday. I know that South African apartheid (apartheid is Afrikaans for “apart-ness”) was part of the U.N. agenda from the very start. It never occurred to me that there might have been discussion about involving the U.N. in matters of American racial segregation.

In general, Malcolm preferred the term “human rights” over the term “civil rights.”

The problem, number one, of the black man in America is beyond America’s ability to solve. It’s a human problem, not an American problem or a Negro problem. And as a human problem, or a world problem, we feel that it should be taken out of the jurisdiction of the United States government and the United States courts and taken into the United Nations in the same manner as the problems of the black man in South Africa, Angola, and other parts of the world, and even the way they’re trying to bring the problems of the Jews in Russia into the United Nations because of violations of human rights. We believe that our problem is one not of civil rights but a violation of human rights. Not only are we denied the right to be a citizen in the United States, we are denied the right to be a human being.

Malcolm X talks about all this and more in an extraordinary clip from CBC-TV’s “Front Page Challenge,” filmed just weeks before his assassination. It’s less than eight minutes long and definitely worth watching.

1. Going into this book, I knew embarrassingly little about Malcolm X. Not only have I never read Malcolm’s autobiography, I haven’t seen the Spike Lee biopic…yet.

2. Malcolm was a leader, but he was also a follower. For years, he willingly submitted himself to his mentor and spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad, even when Malcolm began to learn how truly flawed Muhammad was. (Malcolm reached a breaking point, however, and rightly so.) He never seemed interested in wealth or fame or power for his own end. Malcolm X didn’t lack for confidence, but there was an admirable humility there too.

3. Maybe I’m being swayed by Dr. Marable’s thesis – his subject’s “life of reinvention” – but I’m struck by how “in process” Malcolm X was. His was a mind always at work. When he was assassinated at the age of 39, that process was cut short. A great loss.

Even as I wrap up this book, Malcolm X remains a complicated figure for me. He seemed adept at diagnosing the illness in the soul of America, the heart disease of racism. But I have rarely agreed with Malcolm’s remedies – or at least the remedies he often called for publicly in his first 38 years: violence, vengeance, and separation. It’s understandable why he would reach these conclusions, but I still can’t agree with them. And yet, along with all of the other changes in the last year of his life, Malcolm seemed to be rethinking remedies too. That process was cut short too.

I cried myself to sleep the night Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. I was 14—too young to vote but old enough to know America had, at the ballot, formally turned its back on God. I implored God not to turn His back on America. When I woke in the morning, I was surprised how bright it was, even a little offended the sun had risen at all, as if it didn’t know the world was ending.

I pulled the lever for Dole in ’96, hoping to rescue what Rush Limbaugh called “America Held Hostage.” I stayed up all night watching Round One of the Bush/Gore election on a big-screen TV in the church where I was serving as youth pastor. In 2003, bombs rained on Baghdad, and I raised a glass to toast the military might of the United States. In 2007, I was arrested in front of the White House as part of the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I voted for John Kerry, a decision a few of my Christian friends and family interpreted not as the sum of a complicated political equation but as spiritual rebellion.

Continue reading at the Relevant Magazine website…

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. published five books in his lifetime; a sixth was released after he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. They are all seminal works for American Christians.Stride Toward Freedom (1958) tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Measure of a Man (1959) is a slim volume explaining the theological and philosophical roots of nonviolent activism. Why We Can’t Wait(1964) is a history of the civil rights movement in general, and the 1963 Birmingham Campaign in particular. This book includes his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was addressed to eight clergymen and urged the church to join the struggle for racial justice. King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? is a clear-eyed look at the state of race relations at a moment when the civil rights movement was in disarray. The book also makes a provocative connection between the bankrupt ideology of systemic discrimination, and the literal impoverishment of millions of Americans, white and black. The five speeches that make up The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously in 1968, link the evils of poverty, militarism and racism, and call for nothing less than a nonviolent revolution.

However, the book we’ll focus on here is Strength to Love, a collection of King’s sermons first published in 1963. Reverend Dr. King liked to say that he was, above all else, a clergyman. Everything else he was—civil rights leader, antiwar activist, labor activist, advocate for the poor, writer, public intellectual and Nobel Laureate—flowed from his primary vocation as a Baptist preacher, the son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist preachers.

Continue reading at Relevant Magazine…

Sometimes when I’m reading a good book, I come to a particular sentence or phrase that seems to have around it an aura of origin-ality. I can’t help but wonder if this line might have sparked the creative fire that ended up as the book in my hands. I’m struggling this morning to come up with an example from my recent reading. But I can give a ridiculous example from my own writing life.

The first piece of mine published in a newspaper as an adult was a humorous essay I wrote about Y2K for the Opinion page of the Omaha World-Herald. It was published in September 1999. The essay was not premeditated; I didn’t think I had anything to say on the subject of Y2K. Instead, the piece grew out of a misunderstood song lyric. The third verse of Beck’s “Tropicalia” goes like this:

You’re out of luck
You’re singing funeral songs
To the studs
They’re anabolic and bronze
They seem to strut
In their millennial fogs
‘Til they fall down and deflate

For the longest time, I misheard the phrase “millennial fogs” as “millennial thongs.” When I realized my mistake, I decided “millennial thongs” was too interesting to not be used somewhere, so I started constructing an essay around it. Near the middle of the piece, I imagined what my parents, my brothers, and I would be doing on December 31, 1999:

The five of us boys will be gathered around the Scrabble board tiling words like “apocalypse” and “cataclysm” for triple-word scores. Dad will be in the living room reading what could be the last paper (headline: “See You Tomorrow, We Hope”) or doing what could be his last crossword puzzle. Mom will be in the kitchen tidying up, declaring, “If the world as we know it ends today, there is no way I am going to enter the dark ages with a messy house.” It’ll get messy when the looters come anyway, I think to myself but of course do not dare say out loud.

The television will be on, but there will be little to choose from. The Family Channel will be running a Little House on the Prairie marathon. The Cooking Channel will be airing special programming like Fun with Dried Foods and The Joy of Cooking with Fire. Nickelodeon will air symbolic episodes of Bosom Buddies, while UPN and Lifetime, unaware that anything really noteworthy is going on, will be running its regularly scheduled programs. MTV is presenting its first annual “Rock the New Third World” Beach Blast featuring music by Cher and U2 and a thousand slightly inebriated co-eds running around Pismo Beach in their millennial thongs.

Ahem.

Last year, I re-read Gilead, a novel by Marilynne Robinson, and I read for the first time, Home, which is a companion novel to Gilead. Both novels are set in 1957 in the town of Gilead, Iowa. Gilead is written from the perspective of John Ames, an aging and ailing Congregationalist minister. It is in the form of a letter to his very young son. Home centers on the family of Robert Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister who is Ames’s best friend. The two novels deal with many of the same events and themes. Specifically, they are about the way the lives of John Ames and the Boughton family are shaken when Rev. Boughton’s prodigal son, Jack, returns to Gilead after fleeing in disgrace twenty years earlier.

I think I heard Robinson say somewhere that Gilead started with Ames’s voice. And I think she said somewhere that she wrote Home because the characters in the Boughton family refused to go away. But reading Home – and here I am getting back to my point – I wondered if the novel was in part also a way for Robinson, an admirer of John Calvin, to explore, through the character of Jack Boughton, the more problematic aspects of the doctrine of predestination.

Then a couple days ago, I was reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s fun little book, Why Read Moby-Dick? Philbrick tells the story of when Herman Melville went to Liverpool to visit his friend and literary hero Nathaniel Hawthorne:

It was November, and the two friends went for a walk on the beach in the windy sunshine. They found a sheltered spot amid the dunes and sat down for a smoke. “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity,” Hawthorne recorded in his journal, “and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, not be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

The last sentences of Hawthorne’s journal remind me so much of Jack Boughton that I can’t help but wonder if they served as some inspiration for Robinson. (Robinson studied 19th century American literature, and her first novel,Housekeeping, began as a series of prose exercises inspired by Melville, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson.)

Speculating about the origin of a book or essay or poem is interesting to me both as a writer and reader. Speculation is all it can ever be, unless I have the chance to ask the author someday. Still, those moments are valuable reminders that most creative works don’t present themselves whole-cloth to the creator; they are the end result of a process that includes both inspiration and perspiration, the genesis of an idea as well as the perseverance, discipline, care, and craftsmanship to give that idea form.

What does all this have to do with Slow Church? Besides the obvious – that I’m starting to write another book – I am still considering some answers to this question. I wanted to post something here in the meantime because this has been on my mind. Do you have similar moments when you are reading, listening to music, etc.?

1. Steve Jobs is a valuable book, if we let it be. For all sorts of folks: business leaders, church leaders, lay people, writers and artists, consumers and producers, everyone.

2. Isaacson follows Jobs from his early childhood (he was given up for adoption at birth) and precociously brilliant teenage years, to the creation of Apple, his fall from the top, the success of Pixar, Jobs’s re-ascendence at Apple, and his final battle with cancer. Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews over two years with the famously private Jobs, and he describes the moral, technological, and business failures, as well as the “passion for perfection and ferocious drive,” that determined the shape of Jobs’s success—success that would revolutionize six industries (personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing).

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog…

Maybe the only things better than reading a great book are talking about a great book with someone who has read it too, and recommending a great book to someone you just know will love it. Reading a great book may begin as a solitary experience, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Here, then, are our picks for the 10 best books of the year, along with five very honorable mentions. Leave a comment to let us know if you agree or disagree. And be sure to give us your recommendations for the year’s best book. There’s always a book-shaped hole to fill in the suitcase we’re taking to grandma’s house for the holidays.

Continue reading at Relevant Magazine…

Chris and I both have such high regard for IVP – especially its Likewise imprint, which has published some of our favorite books of the last few years, including books by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Jamie Arpin-Ricci, Andrew Marin, Sean Gladding, Tom Sine, Scott Bessenecker, and Mark Scandrette, among others – that we never “shopped” our proposal anywhere else. We are thrilled and humbled to be a part of this roster of writers and IVP’s rich history.

(As it happens, my first book, Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should, or Will Create Christian Culture, co-written with Jordan Green and Dan Gibson, is now being published by IVP too. Here’s why.)

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog…

Today is the birthday of Dorothy Day – the journalist and social activist who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement. To mark the occasion, I’m posting the essay I wrote 

The photograph on the cover of HarperOne’s 1997 edition of The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day’s classic spiritual autobiography, captures the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement at age 75, just minutes before she is arrested. Day had traveled to California’s San Joaquin Valley, grape country, to support the right of the United Farm Workers to strike. In the photograph, she is seated outside on a portable stool, legs crossed, hands on one knee, wearing glasses, a plaid dress, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She is framed by two figures in the foreground. They are armed policemen, there to take her into custody, and Day looks up at one of them with an expression of serene defiance.

Great-grandmothers don’t often have FBI files 500 pages thick. But saints have a way of disturbing the peace. And by 1973, the year that photo was taken, Dorothy Day had been disturbing the peace for more than half a century—first as a radical bohemian, then as a radical Christian. Day converted to Catholicism in 1927 at the age of 30. Having spent the previous decade writing about issues of labor, poverty, and human rights for radical newspapers, Day lamented that the communists, socialists, and anarchists were consistently sacrificing their own well-being for the good of the poor and their fellow workers, while the church seemed unwilling to do the same.

Then, on a reporting trip to Washington, D.C., in 1933, the depths of the Great Depression, Day knelt in the national shrine at Catholic University and asked God to show her how to use her gifts to help the poor and disenfranchised. The very next day, she walked into her apartment back in New York and found a man waiting for her. His name was Peter Maurin and he was there to convince Day to start a truly permanent revolution—what Day would later describe as “a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us ” The Catholic Worker was born.

The Catholic Worker opened houses of hospitality in inner cities, as well as in extremely poor rural areas. Day and Maurin also organized the Catholic Worker newspaper, which from 1933 to the present has been sold at a cover price of just one penny. Over the years, contributors have included Thomas Merton, Jacques Maritain, and Daniel Berrigan. Day served as the paper’s editor until her death in 1980. Maurin wanted to create a society in which it is easier for people to be good, and from the beginning, the Catholic Worker newspaper has staked out a position of extreme libertarianism, equally distrustful of the welfare state and big corporations because of their power to alienate a man from himself, his community, and God.

Catholic Workers also participated in bold acts of nonviolent disobedience against racism, social injustice, and war. Day was arrested multiple times in the late 1950s for refusing to comply with the rules of New York City’s civil defense drills. For her 1957 witness against the nuclear arms race, she was sentenced to thirty days in jail, where she worked on a book about her favorite saint, Thérèse of Lisieux, “the Little Flower.” Catholic Workers joined protests and picket lines. They held signs bearing quotes from papal encyclicals about workers’ rights. A policeman ordered to break up one such protest said it was like arresting the pope himself.

There are currently about 185 Catholic Worker houses of hospitality around the world, offering food, clothing, and shelter to those who are most in need. These communities provide active support of labor unions and human rights, and pacifism remains a central tenet of the movement.

Day once told a group of visiting Harvard students that the meaning of her life was to live up to the moral vision of the church, and of some of her favorite writers, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Dickens. Indeed, The Long Loneliness can be read as both the autobiography of a reader and a prooftext on the power of books to change lives.

The Catholic Church is currently considering Dorothy Day for sainthood, and while Day drew sustenance from the lives of the saints, one wonders how she would feel about the prospect of joining them. Day was asked about this once when she was alive, and she replied, in essence, “I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” Day seemed uncomfortable with the church resting on its laurels on her account. Not when there is still work to be done.

It is helpful for me to pause at the beginning of the holidays, to consider prayerfully what’s really important, and to decide which Christmas narrative I want to participate in this year: a narrative of over-consumption or the foundational narrative of the Church, which can be summed up in four words: “…and God draws near.” I believe that is our founding story, the pattern of Scripture, and the arc of human history.

In preparation for the season, I went back and read an article I wrote last year for Relevant Magazine about Advent Conspiracy. Advent Conspiracy was started by three pastors – Chris Seay, Rick McKinley, and Greg Holder – and is now a worldwide movement that seeks to make Christmas a scandalous “world-changing event again” by asking people to spend less and give more.

The article was called “Plotting and Advent Conspiracy.” I thought I’d post the first few paragraphs here, as well as a link to the original article on Relevant’s site. If you haven’t heard of Advent Conspiracy, I encourage you to check them out. And let me be the first to say, Happy Holidays!

Four miles from my house, atop the highest hill in the area, sits a Benedictine monastery. A dozen cement-and-brick buildings encircle the hilltop, including the church, abbey, retreat house, library and seminary. I don’t think I can see my house from the monastery, but on clear days, which are rare enough in western Oregon this time of year, I can get a 360-degree view of the valley, encompassing hundreds of square miles of farms, fields, nurseries and small forests of Christmas trees. I am an oblate novice at the monastery. I don’t do a good job of remembering to pray for my Benedictine neighbors, but I know they are praying for me. Six times a day, the monks offer praise and thanksgiving to God through the Liturgy of the Hours. They pray for the region, and I like to think of the monastery as a lighthouse that has been pulsing in this dark corner of the world for nearly 130 years.

The day I write these words is the third Sunday of Advent. This is my favorite time of year to visit the monastery, and I woke up early to attend a morning service. “Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads,” the monks sing. “They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” And later: “He has sent us a mighty Savior / from the royal line of his servant David, just as he promised …” Joan Chittister describes Advent as “the season that teaches us to wait for what is beyond the obvious.” Beyond the obvious is God entering the world as flesh, blood and bone. The response is jubilation. Thus, the pivot of history is proclaimed: “I am bringing you good news of great joy.”

That jubilation can be hard to find during the holidays. Christmas has become a flashpoint between two empires, the Kingdom of God and the religion of over-consumerism. I’ve read the end of the story, so I know who wins, and I’ve come to the monastery to sing and pray and declare my allegiance. It’s likely another Christmas could have quickly come and gone—with the strange, numinous beauty of the Incarnation lost beneath a mountain of presents and the hectic obligations of the season—but this year I’m participating for the first time in Advent Conspiracy, which has me thinking about Christmas in a new way.

Read the rest of the article and my interview with Greg Holder here at Relevant Online.