Links, Links, and More Reviews
And Some Thoughts on the Interconnections of the Moral Life
I’m out of town, and forgot my power cord, so I’m writing on 25 minutes of power. The beginning of the end of the institutions will have to wait til perhaps Sunday night.—The Management
The long-awaited book release day has arrived, and A Fieldguide to Nonviolence has been flung into the world. My co-author and I have been making the podcast rounds, some of which you can hear here and here. The early reactions have been exactly what we hoped for: that it clears up some of the muddiness around what Christian nonviolence is, as it has been described by its proponents and not by its critics. And it’s helped me to think more clearly about some of the dynamics and internal tensions.
Another book, offering my constructive account of some of the dynamics from the Fieldguide, is available for pre-orders here.
In some ways, publishing Fieldguide is the culmination of a lot of years thinking about this topic, beginning with some articles, my first book, a few other books (all of which you can see here). It’s an issue I’m sure that I won’t leave behind forever, but as I round the corner on this book, I’m intentionally turning the page on my writing, away from issues of violence particularly (though I have a couple of more things still to come out), and toward another issue that I’ve been thinking and writing on as a sideline for a few years: migration. The Hedgehog Review gave me the chance to review a couple of recent titles on the topic together, and I’m the co-director of a Christian Colleges and Universities grant that’s going to be bringing together folks to think and write on what ancient Christianity might have to say about the topic.
I began thinking about migration in 2014, right around the time that the Syrian conflict was heating up, and observing the ways in which violence was a key driver for migration globally. It always has been, whether because of the ways violence destroys economies, trade agreements dry up agriculture, or civil wars make people stateless. Having lived in Texas for so long, it took leaving Texas in 2014 to see the ways in which migration had always been a part of my world: I was just too immersed in the world of war and peace to see it.
The Christian life is not, I repeat emphatically, a series of disconnected questions about ethics. I genuinely hate the books that are “50 Moral Questions”, because the present the moral life as if they are math problems, discrete loci in which our moral life can be fractured into right answers. The Christian life is rather a genuine journey of discipleship, which call us to pay attention to the ways in which the wounds of the world are all connected, and the grace of God which we cordon off to one question flows into all those broken spaces.
To not have been aware of parts of the puzzle before does not make one a bad person: I can’t emphasize that enough either. Our culture is one which incredibly ingracious to those who don’t see things they either couldn’t have seen before, or about which the culture itself was blind to ten minutes before. But once you see it, the call of God is to attend to it, given all of our limits as creatures, but without letting the fields to be plowed and dead to be buried be excuses for not saying No to that which God is continually saying Yes to.
We’ll pick up with institutions next time—perhaps a bonus issue this Sunday?—but for now, rest in the knowledge that God is calling out our moral lives, and that so much of that journey begins by simply paying attention.