A review of “Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World” by Lynne Baab
Article first published as Book Review: Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World by Lynne Baab on Blogcritics.
In “Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World” Lynne M. Baab thoughtfully explores many aspects of modern friendship. Baab does so, largely, from a Christian perspective with particular consideration for how social media affects friendship these days — for better or for worse. I found the book an enjoyable read and recommend it to individuals and book groups who care to consider our modern friendship predicament.
The book begins with several chapters that consider the challenges of friendship in our virtual world. Baab, a professor in New Zealand with strong ties to the U.S., appreciates how communication technologies allow her to keep up her worldwide friendships relatively easily. Though, she admits, “nothing replaces a hug.”
Baab advocates a complex understanding of how social media affects friendships, longing “for leaders, ministers, writers and observers of culture to stop describing electronic community in black-and-white terms, to stop viewing it all as bad or, as occasionally happens, as all good.” This balance serves Baab well, and allows for folks who come to the book with different perspectives on technology to consider both sides.
Later, the work considers more broadly questions about how to make and keep friends, questions that are not specific to modern friendship. In chapters on friendship with God, and the practices of friendship — sharing, caring, being together, being apart, pacing, choosing, accepting, forgiving — Baab reflects on what makes friendships work (or not) and how to cultivate healthy friendships. Each chapter concludes with half a dozen questions for “reflection, journaling, discussion or action.”
As someone who has moved many times in the last six years, I’ve wrestled with many of the challenges Baab discusses. How and when it is it appropriate to initiate a friendship in a new place? How often should we hang out when we do become friends? How do I balance old friends with new? Though I often discuss such questions with my partner Megan, it is seldom that I read others considering the same conundrums. “Friending” does well to begin a broader conversation.
Perhaps it’s unfair, then, to criticize “Friending” for not going further. I did note, however, that Baab did not directly tackle one modern challenge of friendship in my life, mainly how to make and maintain friendships with people of widely different perspectives. U.S. culture, at least, is becoming more and more stratified and people are tending to associate only with like-minded individuals. A discussion of these challenges would have been helpful for me, especially with an eye to friendships across faith perspectives.
Overall, though, “Friending” is a helpful foray into what friendship looks like these days. At 182 pages, it can only do so much, but its personal and reflective tone reads smoothly and serves as a nice introduction to friendship. Thanks, Lynne Baab. You have a virtual friend in me.
InterVarsity Friending info
Lynne Baab website here
You should probably be using Dropbox. It’s swell.
Many technological moons ago — like, well, at least a year ago — someone told me about Dropbox, a cloud-based storage, sharing, and file backup system. I checked it out super-briefly online and thought, “I have no use for this.” Then, I moved on.
Now, I use Dropbox every day and totally recommend it to you. A few things changed in the meantime. First, I got an iPad and so needed to access files on my laptop from my iPad. Others of you may have a work computer and a home computer and would like to backup files on both, and have full access to all your files at all times. Dropbox enables seamless syncing, and you can even have easy access when not connected to the internet.
Second, I started working on my sermons for the Montreat Youth Conferences and it was very important that they be saved and backed-up. So, I saved them with Dropbox and rested easily.
Third, I started using the Dropbox share feature. If you want to share one of your files with a friend, just move it to your Public folder, right click, and send them the link that pops up. Simple sharing. No special uploading or attachments.
Finally, these past weeks in Montreat all the planning team members have used Dropbox to send files to the Montreat staff, to get orders of worship synced, and to share files for use in Anderson Auditorium. Dropbox is a simply smooth way to do this, and no more annoying easy-to-lose jump drives.
So, yeah, you should check out Dropbox. You get 2GB of storage for free! That’s been plenty for me. Don’t drop out of tech goodness, drop-in to Dropbox.
(disclosure: if you sign-up for Dropbox from my links I get more storage space. No pressure, I just want to be upfront.)
Book Review: ‘The Hospitality of God: Emergent Worship for a Missional Church’
Article first published as Book Review: The Hospitality of God by Mary Gray-Reeves and Michael Perham on Blogcritics.
In my new work as mission developer for The Project F-M, a new faith community in Fargo-Moorhead, I think a lot about what a new worship gathering might look like. I also try to attend a wide variety of worship services in the community so I get a feel of what the worship scene is in these parts. If I’m honest, most of those visits leave me pretty wanting. But reading the book, The Hospitality of God: Emergent Worship for a Missional Church, got me really excited about alternative, creative, and faithful forms of missional and emerging worship.
The authors, Mary Gray-Reeves (serving in California) and Michael Perham (serving in England) are both Bishops in the Anglican tradition. The book is their take — simple reporting and thoughtful analysis — on 14 Anglican-related emerging worship communities in the US and England. The result is a readable comprehensive study that’s chockfull of smart reflections that critique carefully and judge with humility.
Organized according to topic rather than worship community, in each section the authors give a generous snapshot of a worship community or two, and then reflect how this community connects with traditional Anglican principles.
For example, “Authority is a Conversation” explores how the traditional notion of pastoral authority and institutional church authority is often supplanted in emergent/missional communities. Instead of giving authority because a priest wears a collar, emergent communities function with what the authors call, “indigenous authenticity.” The congregations they visited were connected to their ministry context, invested in their communities, and cared for their partners but from their own very intentional terms rather than those dictated from a church hierarchy. Along those lines, sermons in emergent churches the authors experiences “were preached by laity, sermons responded to in conversation during a feedback time, or individuals creating their own reflections by participating in Open Space.”
Though the variety of the faith communities the authors visits is vast — from house churches, to once-a-month worship experiences connected to traditional congregations, to a very traditional Compline service which attracts 500 folks in their 20s and 30s — the one thing the churches seem to have in common, the authors write, is an open communion table with much emphasis on all being welcome regardless of age, baptismal status, or belief.
I also appreciated their description of Open Space worship (which my buddy Adam Walker Cleaveland curates) from a few different settings. The authors conclude the chapter with their assertion: “What is evident here, despite a huge variety of approach, is a deep and reverent commitment to the Bible, serious study of it, and frequent use of it, most of the time in step with the rest of the church.”
As I visit congregations in Fargo-Moorhead, I find myself pretty-much being able to guess what their worship services will be like from their website whether they’re a traditional ELCA congregation or a Baptist new church start. It could be argued this is a good thing for sure. But, in many ways, that seems problematic to me.
For folks who want to go to church there are options — an attractional service with big band and long sermon in an auditorium, a high church liturgical service in an old building with pews, to name two. But what of the woman who says to a bishop, as quoted in the book, “I don’t go in for that church shit, but I need something more, and this [worship experience] is my something more?”
In the closing chapters, the authors make this clarifying — and telling — distinction. “Emergent churches,” they write, “do not hold as their first matter of importance the survival of the church…This distinguishes them from many institutional churches who are primarily concerned with their own survival, and only secondarily with the spirituality hungry, or those otherwise in need.” The authors mean it not as a crack on the institutional church, but merely an observation. For this reader, however, it was both telling and true.
More and more books are being published which look at emergent congregations, but this analysis of Anglican-related emergent and/or missional faith communities is the best I’ve read yet. It has it’s flaws for sure — the authors’ voice is sometimes confused by different use of American or British English, I couldn’t stand the lack of pictures and videos, and the included liturgy just left me questioning more — but I wholeheartedly recommend this little gem.
If you’re a member of a traditional congregation, read this with your Worship Committee. If you’re not, read this book for a glimpse into what creative new faith communities can be, or at least, what the emerging faith communities the authors studied are exploring right now.
Review of Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together”
[Article first published as Book Review: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together" on Blogcritics.]
I have several speaking engagements on faith and technology lined up in the coming months, so I figured I should probably learn something about faith and technology sometime soon. With that in mind, I picked up Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, and boy am I glad I did.
Turkle is making the rounds these days. Here she is on All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, and Krista Tippett On Being, She’s popular because a) she must have an awesome publicist and b) she says reflective informed things about how Americans use technology.
I underlined and dog-eared the heck out of my copy of Alone Together, so there’s dozens of quotes I’d like to share. However, the basic premise is this. Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.” Turkle says, “We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us.” A psychologist who teaches at MIT, Turkle has the studied robotics, computers, and handheld technologies for years. Her basement, she says, is like a graveyard for toy robots — Furbys, Tamagotchi, My Real Babies, etc. She conducts dozens of qualitative studies on technology’s effects on folks, particularly young people. She writes well too, plainly but persuasively.
The book is in two parts. The first, “The Robotic Moment: In Solitude, New Intimacies” explores how robots — toys, mostly, but also companions and, increasingly, medical devices — affect the way we live. In these chapters, she asks interesting questions about times when robotic pets replace real pets and robotic nurses replace real carers. She had conducted interviews in which kids say things like, “I wish I could build a robot to save me from my brothers…I want a robot to be my friend…I want to tell my secrets.” Another preferred a robot dog AIBO because it could do things the boy’s dog couldn’t do like not get sick and die.
I hadn’t considered robots much before reading Alone Together, but now I’m fascinated. Especially, the robots developed to comfort residents of nursing homes make me wonder about the importance of human nurture — if humans develop a robot that comfort elderly folks, can that be seen as an extension of our care or the renunciation of it?
The second part of the book is about the effects of networked lives on our culture, and especially on our children. I was most struck by stories of teenagers who longed for their parents to get off their phones and be more present with them — at the dinner table, at school pick up, at sports events, even watching TV. Turkle says she went into the project expecting to find parents complaining about their kids’ addiction to technology, but she actually found kids complaining about their parents more often.
Here are just a few quotes from Turkle’s research to whet your appetite:
- “If Facebook were deleted, I’d be deleted…All my memories would probably go along with it…If Facebook were undone, I might actually freak out…That is where I am. It’s part of your life. It’s a second you.”
- “Second Life gives me a better relationship that I have in real life. This is where I feel most myself. Jade accepts who I am. My relationship with Jade makes it possible for me to stay in my marriage, with my family.
- A teenager who says he has to respond to texts in ten minutes max, “I will tell you how it is at this school. If something comes in our our phone and it’s a text, you feel you have to respond…Few people can look down at their phone and then walk away from it. Few people do that….Texting is pressure. I don’t always feel like communicating. Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?”
My basic approach to technology these days is this: I love it, but we can’t pretend it’s anything other than value neutral. It is affecting our society in enormous ways, and while many of them are grand, many of them are also serious and potentially problematic. Increasingly, such questions present significant ethical dilemmas that people of faith must speak to carefully. Alone Together is a mighty fine layperson’s introduction to where we are as a technological and social media society. Sherry Turkle understands that “children must grow up in their own generation,” that technology is here to stay. But Turkle also knows that technology isn’t our savior either.
Review: Exodus from Hunger
Originally posted at Gathering Voices: Faith Conversations from TheThoughtfulChristian.com
It seems to be in the headlines every week in Minnesota — “Homelessness Numbers Rise,” “Food Pantries Struggle to Keep up With Demand,” “Income Gap Widens” — our world, and our nation, is hungry. I know this. But, at the same time, the problem is so overwhelming and wide-reaching that it paralyzes me.
When I consider hunger in America, I think back to a youth group activity many years ago for which we were split into different small groups. Each group was to buy and then make an evening meal. The catch: we had a day’s worth of food stamps from which to do it (or something like that, at least). So we went out to the store and found, very quickly, how difficult it is to live on food stamps alone. Nobody went home from that youth group session very full, but we learned a lesson.
Similarly, a few years ago the Michigan and Oregon governors lived for a time on the equivalent to their state’s food stamp aid. In Minnesota, there’s currently a debate raging about whether residents on public assistance should be able to access more then $20 in cash each month.
With this background in mind, I read David Beckmann’s Exodus from Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger. It’s a good book, helping put the hunger fight in context, both in the U.S and beyond. Beckmann has made a career out of this struggle, and I most appreciated his perspective as a person of faith. The premise of the book is summed up in this word from the introduction:
I’m convinced that the binding constraint [for hunger reduction] is political will, and that stronger leadership from the U.S. government is crucial. I’m also convinced that God is present in this struggle, and that people of faith and conscience should do our part, partly by changing U.S. politics on hunger and poverty issues.
Please don’t put this book down without deciding to do something to help build a stronger political constituency for U.S. policies to provide help and opportunity for hungry and poor people.
Beckmann serves as president of Bread for the World, “a collective Christian voice urging our nation’s leaders to end hunger in our country and the world.” The book is sort of an overview of Bread for the World’s mission, an extended explanation of our current crisis and a work of passionate hope for how we might address it politically.
The book is in three parts. Part one addresses the present crisis with helpful charts and more personal vignettes. Part two hits the faith angle, arguing that caring for the hungry is both a Biblical mandate and would be a boon to America. The third part is a rallying cry for forward movement.
Perhaps my favorite quote from the work comes from British Prime Minister, David Cameron: “Poverty is not acceptable in our country today. Not when we have people who earn more in a lunchtime than millions will earn in a lifetime, not when we understand so clearly how wealth is created and poverty eradicated.” I also especially appreciated Beckmann’s close connection of our call to eradicate hunger as a call from God.
Most of my experience with Bread for the World (beside hanging out with a friend who works there) is participating in their letter writing campaigns to elected officials, what they call “An Offering of Letters.” I’ve also used them to follow hunger-related legislation through the legislative process. I definitely have some friends who scoff at these letter writing campaigns, so let me be clear (and also remind myself): it’s a false choice between either writing legislators and volunteering at food pantries, and it’s most certainly the case that legislators listen to careful cries for hunger-related justice.
So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with hunger and poverty headlines, or if you just wish to understand the situation surrounding the politics of hunger more clearly, pick up a copy of Exodus from Hunger and feed your soul.
See also: A Study Guide on Exodus from Hunger (written, in fact, by a good friend of mine).
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Exodus from Hunger
By David Beckmann
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Review: This Odd and Wondrous Calling
Most books, I read neither slow nor fast, enjoying the journey but anticipating the end without any remorse. Other books, I fly through, captivated by an adventuresome story or thrilling new ideas. This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers, however, I read slowly, savoring each word, taking long breaks between chapters to rest in the experience. But, strangely, when I finally finished, I felt underwhelmed with the work as a whole. The journey was in luxury class, but the destination somehow failed to impress.
Most likely, the fault is more mine than the authors, for Martin B. Copenhaver and Lillian Daniel write a fine essay, tell a good joke, and reflect with the best of them. Both ministers in the United Church of Christ – Lillian Daniel of the younger female variety, Martin Copenhaver of the more-seasoned male type – the two authors string together twenty-eight essays reflecting on pastoral ministry. As a primer on the complexities, joys, and challenges of pastoral ministry, this book isby far the best I have come across. A how-to manual, it is not; a contemplative account of “the public and private lives” of two pastors, it most certainly is.
Most of essays read as reflections, careful considerations of the strange calling we pastors live into each day. For example, in the chapter entitled “Shaking Hands,” Copenhaver describes the gauntlet that a pastor faces when shaking hands at the church door following worship. After a thoroughly entertaining play-by-play of what goes through his head in those ninety seconds following worship, Copenhaver writes, “Through the years I have learned the historical and theological foundations of practically every word and gesture in the liturgy, but no one has ever explained to me why pastors stand in doorways and shake hands with worshipers following worship. I just know that you better do it.” So, Copenhaver reflects upon the ritual in which most every pastor participates each Sunday. The essay, which once appeared The Christian Century (as did others in the collection), is at the same time ruminative, fun, and helpful.
Each author surely could have published a book individually, but the collection stands better with its multiple perspectives. For instance, both Daniel and Copenhaver write of the experience of their spouses being the minister’s wife/husband, and their very different experiences remind the reader there is no one way to pastor (or be married to one). Similarly, Copenhaver writes of growing of as a “preacher’s kid” while Daniel writes of her journey from the Episcopal church of her youth to the UCC in which she currently serves. In, “I Was Looking for the Pastor, But You’ll Do” Daniel writes of her time trailblazing as the first female associate pastor at a church.
In a kind-spirited response to Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church, Copenhaver closes the collection with “Staying in Church,” where he writes, “I also recognize that some of the reasons given for leaving are, with the slightest turn of the kaleidoscope, some of the same reasons I stay in pastoral ministry.” In fact, Copenhaver later takes on Taylor’s search for God in nature by writing that he prefers to search for God “among the quirky, flawed, and broken people” in the church.
If the chapters are knit closely together, it is by the common thread of tension that pastoral ministry provides. The authors take that thread and wrestle with it, enjoy it, ponder it until the tension eases and God’s peace remains. This is not to say the essays strive for a simple culmination, but that they tend to end closer to resolution than where they began. And that, I think, is what made me uncomfortable with the work as a whole.
At the end of the book, I wanted to ask the authors, “But what keeps you up at night? Don’t you ever just scream or lose your cool?” Even the stories of their mistakes end up leading to a pretty nugget of wisdom. Perhaps the fact that I’m a young pastor still working out the kinks of my call makes me a natural skeptic, but at times I wanted them simply to say, “Ok, we’ll be honest, this part of ministry isn’t a lesson, it’s just a liability.”
Even still, or perhaps because of this, the book is a wonder in itself. Beautifully written, thoughtfully put-together, honest and personal, I think this might just be the best reflection on pastoral ministry around. No matter how quickly you read it, it shouldn’t fail to entertain, even if it could leave you slightly uneasy.
Feminists go to the movies
Originally posted at Gathering Voices: Faith Conversations from TheThoughtfulChristian.com
I love how blogs make me think.
Last week, teacher/writer/friend Ellie Roscher posted here about the sexism present at the Academy Awards. Ellie said that her high school students, when asked what female figures they look up to in life give personal examples like mothers, grandmothers, family members. But, when the boys give examples of folks they look up to, they tend to give examples from public life — musicians, athletes, politicians. Ellie then traces this thread of sexism through last weekend’s Oscars.
Ellie says,
Colin Firth, a brilliant man of integrity who I have been deeply in love with since he played Mr. Darcy in the five hour long BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, rightfully won best male actor in a lead role for playing a man who overcame a stammer to become a powerful king. That is a story I would want my young men to know.
But Natalie Portman, while perhaps deserving of the Oscar for her performance in Black Swan,
plays an anorexic ballerina who is a victim of sexual and emotional abuse, achieving perfection by simultaneously embodying virgin and whore only to commit suicide after physically harming herself along the way. What is more, the film perpetuates our society’s tendency to blame the victim.
Who do you want your child to look up to, the king who overcame adversity to lead his people through war or the masochist with an eating disorder?
Ellie’s post reminded me how my worldview is shaped by the films I enjoy, even well-made award-winning ones. Then, a few days later, Melissa Wiginton posted “The King’s Speech” and Feminism, exploring how the feminist notion of “finding one’s voice” is portrayed in helpful ways by men in The King’s Speech.In fact, Melissa argues that The King’s Speech even has a new masculinity about it:
To see it as a story of men dealing with difficulty through mutual vulnerability that brings transformation begins to suggest something other than patriarchy. It points to the possibility of new archetypes, metaphors, models and ways of being through which men of all colors can flourish, for their own souls and for the vitality of our common life.
Now my turn. Several other Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture are ripe for feminist pondering, at least three in largely positive ways.
The Kids Are All Right tells the story of a lesbian couple’s challenge to keep their relationship strong amidst pressures of work, raising children, and questions of the anonymity (or not) of their sperm donor. The main conflict of the movie is infidelity and the pain it causes the couple’s relationship and the family in general. But, in the main, it’s the story of a relationship persevering even though the partners have hurt each other deeply. It’s sensitive, thoughtful women trying to live out forgiveness.
True Grit, a Coen brothers remake of Charles Portis’ novel of the same name, showcases the wittiest fearless 14 year-old you’ll ever see on film. Mattie Ross is hellbent on finding her father’s murderer, and she goes to extreme lengths to do so, employing a Deputy US Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to get the job done. Mattie’s peculiarities may stop some women from wanting to emulate her — though her vocabulary is tremendous — but she’s a female character that breaks barriers and finds her way in a broken male-dominated world.
Finally, my favorite female from this year’s Oscars is surely 17 year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) in Winter’s Bone. Again, Ree shows courage beyond anything I could ever muster, but also wisdom, insight, and perseverance. She is an every woman’s woman, loving as a mother, kind and gentle, ruthless and pugnacious when necessary.
But. But, there’s still a problem. Each of the three films The Kids Are All Right,True Grit, Winter’s Bone, have leading women who shine because of their ability to navigate society’s brokenness. Responding to Ellie’s opening query: I’d love for high school girls to emulate the positive attributes of any of these women and I wish they didn’t have to.
Additional Resources from www.TheThoughtfulChristian.com
- “Juno,” by Gina Yeager-Buckley (Youth Movie Study)
- There has been much debate over the role women play in the books and movies in the Twilight saga. Click here to see a list of Adult, Youth, and Parenting studies on Twilight and New Moon.
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