Fall has been the season for new books and for submitting and editing manuscripts. Especially this year. New books are arriving at my doorstep, some of which will appear on this Substack for conversations, including Lisa Swartz’s new book. Tis the season, too, for books putting the magnifying glass on the American version of evangelicalism.
Photo by Eliabe Costa on Unsplash
aw prints will continue to be found around Buckingham Palace, but this time they won’t belong to corgis. Instead they will be from Queen Camilla’s Jack Russells.
Beth, 11, and Bluebell, 10, will move into Buckingham Palace with their humans, a.k.a. King Charles and Queen Camilla, once renovations are complete. Until then, they will continue to live at Clarence House.
Queen Camilla adopted the dogs from the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in 2017. Her Majesty is the organization’s patron and on a recent visit there she urged people to adopt shelter animals and as she called it, “find a friend for life”, saying “you have all seen how easy it is to go there and come out with an animal, I’ve done it twice.”
It was on that same visit that Beth became a working royal dog. She helped her mom unveil a plaque at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. Queen Camilla said that Beth and Bluebell, like all dogs, are also great listeners: “The nice thing about dogs is you can sit them down, you could have a nice long conversation, you could be cross, you could be sad, and they just sit looking at you, wagging their tail.”
Bluebell was found in the woods with no hair and Beth was tied to a post. In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live, Queen Camilla shared their rescue story: “Along I went to Battersea, and Beth appeared, and she had just been moved from pillar to post and dumped. We thought it would be nice for her to have a friend. They found [Bluebell] two or three weeks later, wandering about in woods, no hair on her, covered in sores, virtually dead. And they nursed her back to life and her hair grew again. She’s very sweet, but a tiny bit neurotic, shall we say.”
For the King and Queen, Beth and Bluebell are family as Her Majesty remarked: “They are family, friends and ever-faithful companions and, just like anyone else with a passion for dogs, I can’t imagine life without them.”
Global animal populations are declining, and we've got limited time to try to fix it.
That's the upshot of a new report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, which analyzed years of data on thousands of wildlife populations across the world and found a downward trend in the Earth's biodiversity.
According to the Living Planet Index, a metric that's been in existence for five decades, animal populations across the world shrunk by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018.
Not all animal populations dwindled, and some parts of the world saw more drastic changes than others. But experts say the steep loss of biodiversity is a stark and worrying sign of what's to come for the natural world.
"The message is clear and the lights are flashing red," said WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini.
According to the report's authors, the main cause of biodiversity loss is land-use changes driven by human activity, such as infrastructure development, energy production and deforestation.
Speaking of evangelicalism…
John Hawthorne’s interaction with Kathryn Post’s RNS story about Christian colleges.
What I found particularly interesting about the story was its focus on parents who were unhappy with Culture War positions taken by many Christian Colleges. They are unhappy because they want the best possible education for their children within the context of a Christian community. They fear that the college’s political posture in terms of “Wokeness” or LGBTQIA+ inclusion or republican talking points would interfere with that desired education.¹
My contribution to the story, in addition to what I hope was useful background, was this:
John Hawthorne, a retired sociologist who studies religion, politics and higher education, predicts that as younger generations become less religious, prospective students will be more likely to avoid Christian colleges due to perceived political conservatism rather than perceived liberalism.
“There are not enough conservative parents out there to support all the conservative schools who want to show how conservative they are,” said Hawthorne. “Especially among Gen Z, smaller and smaller percentages every year are into those harder, more narrow, right-wing stances.”
I want to unpack those two paragraphs here (it’s my newsletter, after all). The history of Christian Higher Education shows the dominance of an oppositional stance to the rest of higher education and society as a whole. It is supported by the well-documented sense of perceived oppression against people of faith.² Five years ago, the Public Religious Research Institute (PRRI) found that 57% of white evangelicals believed that there was a lot of discrimination against Christians compared to a third of all those surveyed.
Such a belief creates a defensiveness against the imagined threats. Christian colleges respond to the fears of the threats by attempting to create ironclad Worldviews³ that provide appropriate apologetics against the outsiders. Those Worldviews, while positioned as “Biblical defenses”, were still essentially fear-based. They argue that we cannot address certain topics because of what that might do to the superstructure that was created. An earlier book project of mine, abandoned a couple of years ago, had a chapter on how millennial evangelical memoirists who knew their Worldview very well found it crumbling in the face of lived experience in the larger world.
Why other possible reason could there be for this biblical injuction to preserve bushy beards and unruly sideburns?
My (admittedly smooth-faced) pastor Karen Campbell explained. She pointed out how, in Leviticus, the flourishing of God’s people is linked to the flourishing of the land. In Leviticus 19:9, it reads: “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the glenaings of your havest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.”
She went on:
The book of Leviticus gives a plethora of guidelines to encourage deep holy living. What is striking is that this is not just a personal holiness code but it affects relationships with God, neighbor and land. The deep intrinsic interdependence between humanity and land is suggested through the use of anthropomorphism. Ellen Davis in her book Opening Israel’s Scriptures describes how the land often acts as a mirror to humans.
In Leviticus 19:9 and 19:27 the same Hebrew word for ‘edge-growth’ is used to refer to both land and humans. Yahweh instructs the people to ensure the poor and hungry are fed by leaving an edge of growth around their fields to enable sojourners to glean freely. Interestingly, the same word emerges in an instruction for men not to round off the edge of growth on their heads or spoil the edge of growth on their beards. It is as if what is supposed to happen on the land is mirrored in the farmer’s face. As a farmer rubs his hands across his rough, bristly chin, it serves as a reminder to leave an edge of growth for the poor. Intentional uncropped facial hair serves as a mirror to uncropped land that he “may be reminded of the peculiar mystery of their shared existence, their interdependency and common dependence on the grace of God” (Davis, 2019, 77).
So yes, a beard may well be seen as a sign of biblical masculinity. Every time a man strokes his beard—to ponder something, perhaps even the nature of his own manhood and the extent of his power—he is reminded of his need to care for the poor, the foreigners, the marginalized.
And masculinist readings missing what women see in the text.
And singing “Above All” (and about the flag and masks, too?):
There is a reason why one of the most influential worship songs of the past quarter century expresses a truth that could turn evangelicalism upside down and yet has been repeatedly rejected and banned by conservative evangelical complementarian Calvinists.
Growing up in an independent Baptist world where contemporary worship music was categorically condemned, I was a 19-year-old worship leader who would sneak away to the Family Christian Bookstore in the local mall so I could put on the store’s headphones and listen to Paul Baloche and Lenny LeBlanc’s song, “Above All.” Its beautiful simplicity spoke to my soul at a depth that the piano- and organ-led hymns we sang at church simply didn’t reach at the time.
When Michael W. Smith sang the song at a Franklin Graham crusade in Spartanburg, S.C., in 2001, I risked getting expelled from Bob Jones University by attending so I could hear it in person.
While my conscience felt conflicted for listening to contemporary worship music behind the backs of my parents and Christian school, my heart longed for the day when I could lead a congregation of worshipers in “Above All.” Then the summer after my sophomore year at Bob Jones University, I landed my dream job leading worship at an evangelical summer camp.
But during the second week of camp, the camp director pulled me aside and said he wasn’t going to allow me to select “Above All” for any of our worship sets that week because a Calvinist church was going to attend that thought it was theologically wrong. And because I soon became a Calvinist, for the next 18 years, I never was able to lead it in any church I was a member of.
Please explain the Calvinist objection to Above All.
Could you elaborate on the objections to the song, "Above All?"