Christian Ethics in the Wild: 2022 Starter's Kit

What To Expect in the Coming Months

It’s 2022, and at the end of the week, I’ll be on my annual retreat to the Cedarbrake Retreat Center in Belton, TX. I’ve done this for the last three years, and it’s one of the things I look forward to the most: it’s two and a half days of quiet, prayer, reading, and listening. If you’ve never been on retreat before—and I mean, by yourself in a time of intentional quiet and prayer—I can’t recommend it enough. Last year, a snowstorm cut my trip short by a day, and I’m looking forward to stretching it out this time, even if it’s going to be hovering around 30 degrees the whole time. During that time, I won’t be writing anything, reading some, but mostly praying, walking in the woods, and planning.

There’s a lot ahead this Spring, both professionally and personally, and I need time and space to hear and think. Much of my day job is administrative (fundraising, recruiting students, planning webinars), and in terms of thinking, these are the kinds of activities that create a lot of mental noise for me, chipping away at any kind of focus needed to be good at the other half of my job: teaching and writing. And so, this time of quiet at the beginning of the year is a way of reclaiming the high ground: there are things which must and should be done well, but they don’t have to ransack the mental castle.

Cal Newport, in his Deep Work, commends the reader in pursuit of an orderly mental world to consider the “grand gesture”, setting aside some long portion of time devoted to this venture of getting the mental house in order; this is, of course, only possible because my wife will be home with the kids for those two days. The thing about us taking on commitments of any kind is that they invariably are a matter of sacrifice, both for you and someone else—the offering on the altar is one which requires the gifting of one’s money and energy, but also the gifting of an entire life for another creature.

But even beyond this weekend, it’s a sacrifice in other kinds of ways: digging in and putting things in order means that I’m commiting myself to the labor of trying to have a more ordered mind, refusing at some level to take on things which move away from that, and not commiting to it in a way which is detrimental to others. I don’t, for example, work after I come home because my family needs my attention and me to be fully present to them. I stay home on Wednesdays because we’ve chosen as a family to home school, and thus, have been doing a full-time job on four days for nearly two years now. There are innumerable limits to commiting to good things, including having a more quiet mind, and those limits are good and right, because the limit is the face of another human being who I love.

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Over the next year, I have a couple of long-term projects that I’ll be working on:

—finishing (Lord willing) a book on 20th century ecclesiology for Baker Academic

—drafting the first chapters of a short book (long overdue) for Cascade Press on Bruce Springsteen and a theology of Christian community

—planning my next big writing projects (of which I’ll say more in coming months).

Finishing the first two of these is, in many ways, something of the closing of a chapter. I began both of those projects what seems like a lifetime ago, when I was teaching primarily doctrine and church history, before my career took a more decisive turn toward Christian ethics when I took the T.B. Maston Chair in Christian Ethics at my former employer. And since then, six years ago now, I’ve been slowly coming to terms with Christian Ethics being my primary home turf, with theology ever and always the drumbeat in the background.

For the next year, the goal with the Substack will remain largely the same, publishing once a week, on Thursdays, putting in place some big stones of what the Christian moral life looks like, in conversation frequently with stuff that’s buzzing in current events and in my reading. We’ve covered some great terrain in 2021, and I’m excited to see where this goes. I’m so grateful to the 250+ of you who signed on for this, who have shared it, who write to give feedback.

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So here’s the new addition for 2021 here that I’ll add sometime late Spring or Summer: a paid sidebar. I’ve gone back and forth about this, but ultimately, I’ve decided to introduce a paid portion of this for two reasons: 1) there are things I want to test drive that are a little too niche for the more broad nature of the Substack, and 2) writing this Substack is a good thing to do, but it’s not my day job. In the last two years, I’ve become more comfortable with the notion that it’s okay to be paid for what you do well, if only because my kids are getting bigger and like to eat more than they did before.

The paid sidebar will appear once a week, and will be the place that I begin to test out portions of future writing projects, as well as do some extended slow reads of some classics in Christian Ethics like Stanley Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom or John Chrysostom’s sermons on wealth and poverty. The paid version will have comment threads and all the bells and whistles, for a very nominal fee (I’m not a Big Deal, and even if I were, I pay for exactly one Substack now as it is. We’re talking less than a cup of coffee per month.)

So, that’s where things are: the semester kicks off in a week, I’m excited about it, I’m ready to be back in the classroom and to do all the things. As always, I’m the luckiest human being on the planet to have the life I do, and the best way I know to offer it back as my reasonable worship is to do well with what I’ve been given. And dear reader, that is where this little Substack comes in: as a way of offering my gratitude, time, and words back out, that they might be of benefit to you in the Christian life.

Here we go.