The Park Forum

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Andy Crouch

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so.

Why aren’t we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

Many attempts, especially Christian attempts, to come to terms with culture have fallen short because they paid too much attention to [individual] categories of culture. High culture, pop culture, ethnic culture, political culture—all are part of culture and worthy of attention, reflection and action. But culture is more than any of these things.

Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else. This is the original insight of the writer of Genesis. God, of course, began with nothing, whereas we begin with something. But the difference is not as great as you might think. For every act of creation involves bringing something into being that was not there before—every creation is ex nihilo, from nothing, even when it takes the world as its starting point.

Changing the world sounds grand, until you consider how poorly we do even at changing our own little lives. I sometimes wonder if breathless rhetoric about changing the world is actually about changing the subject—from our own fitfully suppressed awareness that we did not ask to be brought into this world, have only vaguely succeeded at figuring it out, and will end our days in radical dependence on something or someone other than ourselves.

So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world.

*Excerpt from Andy Crouch, Culture-Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. IVP Books, 2013. Book review at The Gospel Coalition.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 40 (Listen – 5:09)
Revelation 10 (Listen – 1:59)

 

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Curt Thompson, MD

Despite all we know about shame, containing it, let alone disposing of it, is a bit like grasping for mercury: the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes.

Typically, whenever researchers study and discuss shame, we do so as though it is some abstract emotional or cognitive phenomena. We describe shame as something we would do well to better regulate, but not as an entity that has a conscious will of its own.

But I believe we live in a world in which good and evil are not just events that happen to us but rather expressions of something or someone whose intention is for good or for evil. And I will suggest that shame is used with this intention to dismantle us as individuals and communities, and destroy all of God’s creation.

Putting shame to death is not simply about addressing it as a deeply destructive emotional and relational nuisance. For we cannot speak of shame without speaking of creation and God’s intention for it. From the beginning it has been God’s purpose for this world to be one of emerging goodness, beauty and joy. Evil has wielded shame as a primary weapon to see to it that that world never happens.

Consequently, to combat shame is not merely to wrestle against something we detest. Shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to corrupt our relationships with God and each other and disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity.

Shame, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate, random, emotional event that came with us out of the primordial evolutionary soup. It is both a source and result of evil’s active assault on God’s creation, and a way for evil to try to hold out until the new heaven and earth appear at the consummation of history.

Combating shame requires more work than you might imagine. Shame’s power lies not so much in facts that we can clarify but rather in its emotional state, which is so much harder to shake.

Throughout this book you will read the stories of people like you and me who are wrestling with shame and doing their best to fix their eyes on Jesus, do what he did, and despise it on the way to being liberated to create as they were so intended from the beginning.

*Excerpt from Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. IVP Books, 2015. Book review at Hearts and Minds Books.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 39 (Listen – 1:35)
Revelation 9 (Listen – 3:30)

 

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Sherry Turkle

We are being silenced by our technologies—in a way, “cured of talking.” These silences—often in the presence of our children—have led to a crisis of empathy that has diminished us at home, at work, and in public life.

I begin my case by turning to someone many people think of—mistakenly—as a hermit who tried to get away from talk. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, to learn to live more “deliberately”—away from the crush of random chatter. But the cabin furniture he chose to secure that ambition suggests no simple “retreat.” He said that in his cabin there were “three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.”

These three chairs plot the points on a virtuous circle that links conversation to the capacity for empathy and for self-reflection. Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in a more productive solitude.

Technology disrupts this virtuous circle.

The disruptions begin with solitude, Thoreau’s first chair. Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes. We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve.

And this is where the virtuous circle breaks down: Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other. If we can’t find our own center, we lose confidence in what we have to offer others.

I’m not suggesting that we turn away from our devices. To the contrary, I’m suggesting that we look more closely at them to begin a more self-aware relationship with them. So, my argument is not anti-technology. It’s pro-conversation.

We miss out on necessary conversations when we divide our attention between the people we’re with and the world on our phones. Or when we go to our phones instead of claiming a quiet moment for ourselves. We have convinced ourselves that surfing the web is the same as daydreaming. That it provides the same space for self-reflection. It doesn’t.

It’s time to put technology in its place and reclaim conversation.

*Excerpt from Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press, 2015. Book review in The New York Times.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 38 (Listen – 3:20)
Revelation 8 (Listen – 2:15)

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

By Karen Swallow Prior

“This is a celebration of a particular woman, but also of women in general. It is the story of one person’s faith, but also of the power of faith. It is the story of God’s grace pouring into and through one life to impact many others. It is the story of God-given gifts given back to God to be used for the benefit of others.” — David, Park Forum Reader

“Come! Let us ride to London to see bishops and booksellers!” The invitation comes from a small girl standing atop a wooden chair. Her bright eyes sparkle. The chairs have become a carriage, and the girl, Hannah More, is about to embark on an imaginary ride from this little village all the way to the bustling metropolis of London to see the men whose words she knows, even at this young age, have the power to shape the world: the bishops and the booksellers.

[Years later,] Buoyed by empty streets, the shouts of Bristol’s town crier echoed into the city churches and down the aisles, startling the worshippers assembled as usual one midsummer Sunday morning. The crier announced a reward of one guinea to anyone who would bring forward a runaway African girl who’d fled into hiding.

The girl’s master had threatened, for some unknown reason, to ship her to a slave-trading island to be sold, and she’d disappeared. Although slavery had been illegal within the borders of England and Wales since 1772, a “domestic servant” from Africa, such as this girl, was common.

The reward offered for the girl’s return, one guinea, was the British coin minted by Bristol’s Royal African Company as currency for trade in western Africa. In its original language, guinea meant “black person.” The morning’s worship was being interrupted by the offer of a guinea for a Guinea. Twenty shillings for a few stone of flesh.

Sometime after the solemnity of the city’s worship had been broken by the town crier, the girl was found, and the “trembling wretch was dragged out from a hole in the top of a house, where she had hid herself, and forced on board ship.”

The account is recorded by More, who was living in the countryside outside Bristol at the time. “Alas!” More wrote in a letter to a friend, “I did not know it till too late, or I would have run the risk of buying her.”

When she wrote this letter in 1790, More had been actively immersed in the fight against the slave trade for a long time. By the power of her pen, she would journey to London for real—not only in her childhood imagination—where she would see bishops and booksellers, and more, much, much more.

*Excerpt from Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist. Thomas Nelson, 2014. Book review at The Gospel Coalition.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 35 (Listen – 1:43)
Revelation 5 (Listen – 2:39)

This Weekend’s Readings
Isaiah 36 (Listen – 4:00) Revelation 6 (Listen – 3:12)
Isaiah 37 (Listen – 6:37) Revelation 7 (Listen – 2:56)

By Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Summer Reading Series is designed to equip our growing community with curated book recommendations that shape faith and sharpen cultural insight.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits.

Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian “conception” of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins.

The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.

It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

Costly grace is the sanctuary of God. Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

*Excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. Touchstone, 1995. Background and brief biography at The Gospel Coalition.

Today’s Reading
Isaiah 34 (Listen – 2:59)
Revelation 4 (Listen – 2:09)