Planning for the Fall: An Announcement

Coming Attractions for the Remainder of 2022

The summer is very quickly evaporating, and all of the back-to-school meetings have been had. The summer ran away more quickly than anticipated, and as is the usual course, my job responsibilities are shifting around. I don’t anticipate it interrupting things around here too frequently, but then again, can you ever anticipate an interruption? Would it be an interruption if you could foresee it?

For the next few months, I’ll continue to post on the regular schedule—Tuesdays for everyone and Thursdays for subscribers, with a preview, with the occasional goodie thrown in. Here’s what I’m hoping to write on coming up:

—Obligation: the question of who we owe what to, and why, is a question that continues to nag at me, and so, in one form or another, I’m planning on looking at that here. I’ll revisit some old favorites, and press into some new reading along the way. The logic here is simple: we live in an age where social obligation is no longer assumed, and when it is assumed, it’s assumed in ways which perhaps overcommit us. Are there limits to our moral obligations? And if not, why?

There are always questions which emerge which assume that the Christians should care about X, but what is not clear is why they should care about X. As these questions show up, they’ll provide the fodder for teasing all this out.

—Virtues: using Thomas Aquinas’ discussions of virtue as the backbone, we’ll look at length at what it means to be virtuous. This won’t be done in the abstract, but attending to how these look today. As a culture, our moral framework is pretty alien to the virtues; our frame is one of decision-making, of weighing alternatives. The virtues offer a more character-based view which throws into question whether or not the moral life is one of calculation and quandries. ¹

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As the semester unfolds, I’ll have some other writing that I’m doing for various events, and will share some of that here as well. Want to know why we read the Sermon on the Mount as more than a list of rules? Interested in hearing more about how Baptists have thought about migration? Want to hear ruminations on teaching bioethics to undergrads? You’re in luck!²

And as a reminder, the back-to-school sale continues on through the end of the month.

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Reading: Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. Jackson has been one of those writers I’ve wanted to tackle for a while, and a revived book club is a perfect excuse. Saskia Sassen’s A Sociology of Globalization—Sassen is a stalwart in conversations of sociology, migration, and social belonging, and this is helpful in terms of reframing many of the assumptions about what states actually do relative to global movements. Andy Crouch’s The Life We’re Looking For, partly for down the road, and partly to get a handle on my tech habits, which have spiraled out of control this summer.

Paying Attention:

The Southern Baptist Convention being investigated by the FBI, which follows on the heels of this summer’s report about sexual abuse and the complicity of the Executive Committee in both reporting and informing churches. As a Baptist (but not a Southern Baptist), there are both structural and moral reasons for this kind of failure, and if you don’t address the structural ones, all the piety in the world will not help you.

The incoming Saddleback Church pastor has a history of acquiring aging congregations. Saddleback is the megachurch in California founded by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life (which is not a terrible book). While it seems that these instances are predatory, the question of what aging congregations should do with their property is a live one, and one which many churches should be actively thinking about.

Capitol Records signs and then cancels association with an A.I. rapper. This is predictable, because of course a major record label would eventually just cut out the most troublesome aspect of music: humans. When you create an algorithmic human, it’s not good for the people that algorithm supposedly represents, or really anyone.

1. The distinction between our ethics as competing obligations and ethics as virtues is a bit artificial: what we take to be obligatory for us to do is shaped by the kinds of people we take ourselves to be, and the kinds of people we want to be involve us having certain kinds of commitments to others. We’ll sort all this out.

2. Luck? Is that the right word?