After the thrilling success of my book Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration on Kickstarter, I’ve decided to tackle the next lesser-festival/homiletical-impossibility, namely the Ascension! ...
Read moreThe Backstory of "A-Tumblin' Down"
The very first scenes of A-Tumblin’ Down were written in 2006 or 2007, when I was in a little fiction writing group in grad school. Donald and Kitty arrived on the scene first, fully formed and self-named. Donald was already haunted by his imposing grandfather and the historical veracity of the battle of Jericho; Kitty’s council was more real to her than any human beings. Some of the bits of the first two chapters involving them survived to the present novel.
I filed the tiny seeds of this story away in the deep freeze and went on with another dozen or so years of life…
Read moreHow to Launch Your Own Independent Press
It was a great delight and honor to give a talk at the 2021 Japan Writers Conference on “How to Launch Your Own Independent Press.” I really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned over the past two years and condense it for an audience eager to try it out for themselves. How little I realized, before I founded Thornbush Press, what an entrepreneur lay dormant within me! …
Read moreTo Baptize or Not to Baptize; or, How a Lutheran Comes to Commit Casuistry
Upon reading To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy, more than one person has told me, “This is an excellent work of casuistry.” Not exactly the words to warm the heart of a Lutheran theologian. But they meant it as the sincerest of compliments.
And they’re right—in a sense. “Casuistry” is mostly a dirty word inside religious circles and out. It connotes the very worst of all legal and bureaucratic systems: reductionistic, narrow-minded, and inhuman. It binds the innocent in twisty cords of corruption and lets the wicked off the hook on a technicality.
But in fact “casuistry” shares a common Latin etymological root with “case,” as in “case study,” a time-honored strategy for moral discernment. At its best, casuistry is simply case studies, examining the wide and intriguing array of situations that we human beings get ourselves into, and thinking through the possible responses and options that arise as a result.
In that sense, To Baptize or Not to Baptize is chock full of casuistry, as it narrates forty-nine different baptismal situations calling for pastoral discernment. There may well be more…
Read moreMystagogical Realism
I can remember the first time someone told me about Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s magical realism,” he told me. “What’s that mean?” I asked. The answer: “There’s a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate.”
That was enough for me. I was hooked. You can guesstimate when this conversation took place based on the fact that I ended up reading the book in my private berth on an Amtrak traversing halfway across the country because all the flights were shut down due to a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.
Marquez’s fiction has a distinct flavor all its own (of hot chocolate?), but it wasn’t so far off from other books I’d known and loved but had no collective term for. Top of the list was C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
I did not start out loving this book, probably because I was too young the first time I read it. But more importantly because the trilogy structure inadvertently misled me. Out of the Silent Planet takes place on Mars! Perelandra takes place on Venus! That Hideous Strength takes place on… Earth?! I was bitterly disappointed, that first time through.
But subsequent rereadings shifted its status from my least favorite of the trilogy to my very favorite of all of Lewis’s works. It spoke to the intuition that there is much of a wondrous nature even on this Earth. The problem is not wonder’s absence but my (and our) perception thereof…
Read moreTransgenre Theology
Early Lutheran transgenre theology: depicting the distinction between law and gospel visually.
You may have misread the title of this post. Take a second look just to be sure.
I’m fascinated by and obsessed with genre, which is not necessarily the most flattering moniker in the literary world.
“Genre fiction” is dismissed as formulaic, literarily subpar, and morally questionable to boot. Passive tools of the powers-that-be drug themselves with one escapist fantasy after another, whether it’s romance, Western, or sci-fi—or so the accusation goes.
Ursula K. LeGuin taught me to reverse my suspicion toward such suspicion of genre fiction, and enough disappointed dabblings in literary fiction have taught me that there’s more than one way to drug a populace. It’s the sniffy writers of beautiful sentences devoid of meaning or plot who are most likely to claim that their work can’t be classified; it’s beyond genre, so they say.
While I do like to read all kinds of things, I’m not especially devoted to any one genre. If it’s a good story, well told and well written, I’m game. The real reason I’ve become a genre devotee is because of the epistemology it unlocked for me…
Read moreCurated Catechesis
Catechesis is dead. Long live catechesis.
I’ll leave it to someone else to trace out how, exactly, catechesis died in the churches. I can at best hazard a few guesses based on intuition and anecdotes.
For example:
A bad habit of anti-intellectualism made adults turn on the rote education they received as children.
Or, a habit of over-intellectualism made clergy and professors invest more energy in reconciling with science and sociology than covering doctrinal and biblical basics.
Stifling apologetics caused distrust even of modest and ad hoc apologetics.
Claims for ultimate truth came to seem too exclusionary.
Congregational disinclination to pay for a pastor who continued to read and learn.
Pastoral disinclination to keep on growing.
So much Christendom as to make the faith seem self-evident, but not enough Christendom actually to sustain it.
Soccer practice and SAT cram sessions.
TV, internet, smartphones.
Any and all of the above.
At some point, it doesn’t even matter what caused it, only how to reverse it…
Read moreWhat Is Grace? Two Memoirs from Thornbush Press
Click on the cover to order your copy from Amazon!
A year ago, in early February 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and therefore could not under any circumstances have dreamed of how the year would unfold unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Nor would I have imagined that my response to lockdowns, border closures, and economic disaster would be to… start a publishing house.
And then came a further surprise on top of that one: that my publishing house would actually be the ideal home for any author but myself! Not long after Thornbush Press launched, the wonderful, brilliant Katie Langston put the manuscript of her book Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace into my digital hands for a beta read, and I’m not quite sure anymore which of the two of us asked first if Thornbush could be its publisher. I think I tried to talk her into at least trying for a deal with more prestige. She insisted that she preferred the authorial freedom, drastically better profit-sharing, and (I daresay) good fun of working with me instead. I couldn’t bring myself to argue. When you find a pearl of great price lying in a field… run out and buy the field!
The upshot is that Thornbush Press is now officially a two-author outfit! Look out, Random House, here we come.
There is a deeper connection here, though, than convenience and covid. As it turns out, Katie and I have both produced, at roughly mid-life (me a little more mid- than she), memoirs that try to sort out how we ended up where we are right now; both of these memoirs will be published in the next couple of months; and both of them—without knowing anything about the other at the time of writing—are a narrative attempt to answer the question: What is grace? …
Read moreThe New Samizdat
Samizdat is a sexy word borrowed from Russian, as its foreign-to-English consonant cluster zd unmistakably signals. But its literal translation renders a very unsexy, even dopey, notion in the anglophone world: self-publishing.
I can hear your cringe. “Self-publishing” is a polite euphemism for “vanity publishing,” which means 1) you are such a terrible writer you couldn’t persuade even the newest, poorest, most-desperate-to-prove-herself New York literary agent to shop your manuscript around, and therefore 2) you shelled out several thousand bucks to a parasitic scammer who feeds off fragile egos and probably has a brother in the bail bond business, with the result that 3) you can hold your own hardcover, yes, but with such unbelievably lousy cover art and an unforgivable font, not to mention the too-thick, stark-white, badly laid-out pages within, that only your mom and a handful of friends highly susceptible to guilt trips are going to buy it. But they sure aren’t gonna read it. (Well, maybe your mom will.)
The funny thing is, the samizdat’s endearing virtue was precisely its shoddy production quality…
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