Midweek Musings - March 12, 2025
Work and Balance; New Harper Lee; Pedagogy Gurus; the End of Parishes; Asteroid Hunters; Will the Lord Remember Me?
“What advice would you have for us in maintaining work/life balance?”
That was the question recently posed to me by a college student on our campus. Gathered together with a group of young men on a weeknight in Calvary Chapel, we’d spent most of the evening trying to reflect together on what it means to follow Christ as men. The conversation had a lot of familiar themes (there really is nothing new under the sun, after all). But this question caught me by surprise. And I suspect my answer did the same.
“I’m actually not that concerned about most of you achieving work/life balance,” I replied. For some, it may have sounded like I had breathed a heterodox word. Aren’t we all just working ourselves ragged? Isn’t the zeitgeist one of lament that modern Americans (and perhaps GenZ in particular) are so beset by mental health challenges that they lack the resilience to lean in on the urgencies and priorities of adult life, that we’ve asked them to do too much and failed to provide the resources for them to flourish? I, for one, don’t buy it. Our college students carry any number of burdens and I do not mean to denigrate the challenges they experience. I am continually struck by the diverse and difficult life circumstances they are forced to navigate. They do so with remarkable strength and resilience, all of it empowered and sustained by divine grace. But “work/life balance” at 20? I haven’t yet seen a chronic social malady there.
So we backed up a bit and tried to get at what might be behind the question. At its core, I think we’re talking about a priority of loves and how those loves are demonstrated in how we steward our various vocations, duties, and resources.
Is it possible to have an inordinate love for work? I suppose for some it might be. But, as I told those students, I suspect what presents as an idolatrous and unhealthy love for work is actually merely what is seen above the surface. The real disorder is under the soil, at the level of the heart, and is animated by a longing for security, identity, comfort, power, etc. We believe work can deliver these goods and fulfill these longings and so we pour our very souls into jobs and careers, leaving plenty of carnage in our wake, whether in our families, our workplaces, our friendships, or our very souls.
But I don’t think work itself is the problem. In fact, I’m of the mind that many of us—including young adults—need to be called to hard work, to go to bed tired and to get up early. If late modernity is characterized by expressive individualism, it also comes with a steady therapeutic undertone, one that pathologizes everything and is thus obsessed with “self-care.” My hunch is that most of our students, male or female, on campuses like the one I serve are longing for voices of mentors and teachers to call them to something greater, to inspire them to lofty ambitions and achievements, and to summon from them the full measure of their gifting and capacity. That kind of vision of work is one of stewardship, of laboring hard and offering up our work as worship to the living God. If you want an accessible introduction to that kind of vision, check out David Bahnsen’s Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. I suspect it would make a great graduation gift for a high school graduate this spring.
What I think I heard in that student’s question was an earnest concern, one I suspect shaped by experiences and observations where a disordered set of priorities related to work had done real damage. Some of us know firsthand how easy it is to be drawn into a distorted understanding of work that slowly corrodes everything around us. Perhaps that student meant something akin to what Bobby Jameson calls “workism.” Drawn from his forthcoming book, Plough has an excellent essay by Jameson on the subject.
Jameson draws the term from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic: “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.”
Jameson, a faithful pastor and brilliant theologian (who also happens to be a friend), rightly warns against this temptation. There is an approach to work that fails to account not only for our own finite human limitations, but even more tragically offers to vision for the ultimate meaning of what it means to be human and to live according to God’s good design. If Bahnsen rightly calls us to recover a sense of how work itself is indeed a crucial part of what it means to be human, Jameson reminds us that it is not what is most ultimate to our humanity. Somehow, we need both.
How we work will look different in different seasons of life. And clearly God has gifted different people with varying measures of capacity. Chasing “balance” is a quixotic quest. But working as unto the Lord, whether in our paid employment, in our homes, or in our community life? That’s a gift, a rewarding charism, through which we love God and neighbor.
So get to work. Go to bed tired. And trust the Lord for all of it.
Good News for Harper Lee Fans
A lot of us perked up with the recent news of the forthcoming publication of eight Harper Lee short stories. Here’s how the Guardian reports it:
“Eight short stories written before the author started the novel that would become To Kill a Mockingbird were found in Lee’s New York City apartment after she died in 2016. They will be published in a collection titled The Land of Sweet Forever, alongside eight previously published non-fiction pieces by Lee, and an introduction by Casey Cep, author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.”
What will interest many, I suspect, is how Lee used these stories for some of the early character development that took its full form in To Kill a Mockingbird. From the New York Times:
Some of the stories set in the South reveal how Lee began developing Jean Louise Finch, the precocious and perceptive young narrator of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A story titled “The Pinking Shears” features a girl named Jean Louie, who reappears as Jean Louise in a later story, “The Land of Sweet Forever.” The collection will also include some scans of the original typescripts with Lee’s notes.
The new material is scheduled for release this fall and is available for pre-orders now. And if you need a tour of Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, you can do no better than the town’s favorite son, Dr. Dustin Bruce.
Teaching and the Pedagogy Gurus
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Justin Sider has an especially piercing critique of much of the cottage industry within educational circles related to supposed “best practices” in teaching. His essay was prompted as a review of a recent book along those lines, but helpfully expands out into the broader phenomenon. For example:
“Yet the pedagogy gurus offer more than just tools and advice. Though they frame their arguments as objective, “research informed” claims about how we learn and therefore how we ought to teach, what they offer is an ideological program — one from which other professors ought to dissent. That ideology appears first as style, a mélange of branded language borrowed from pop psychology, therapy speak, progressive mantras, and corporate jargon. Adopt a “growth mindset.” Pursue “excellence and innovation.” Cultivate “radical hope.” Rediscover “authentic learning.” Glib and implicitly condescending — did you know your teaching was inauthentic? — this idiom is as contentless as a motivational poster.”
This caught my attention too:
“That teachers and professors — particularly at education colleges — worry earnestly over the practice of teaching, study its conditions, and propose solutions is entirely appropriate. When the consultants show up, though, you may be facing a bona fide racket.”
If you work in higher education or have a vested interest in the quality of teaching that occurs on our campuses (and who doesn’t?!), then the whole article is worth reading. I’m deeply grateful for colleagues who are passionate about excellent teaching, not only as theoreticians but as actual practitioners. And, as I routinely tell our faculty at Biola University, give students the grade they earn and I will back you up. Every time.
The End of the Catholic Parish?
Over at The Lamp, editor Matthew Walther stares headlong into the dire and declining statistics of Roman Catholicism in the United States and concludes:
“the future for American Catholics is the “smaller Church” envisioned by Pope Benedict XVI. We are headed there, I will not say inevitably, but almost certainly, barring some extraordinary unforeseen irruption of grace. Such things do happen, of course, but they are usually very sudden affairs. They cannot be predicted, much less counted upon; they certainly cannot be quantified, least of all in advance. Which is why I think it is fair to say that the smaller Church is probably coming whether we are prepared for it or not.”
You can read Walther’s essay for more of the background reasons for his prediction. But his primary focus is a proposal to upend the traditional Catholic parish model. Distinguishing between what he terms “familial” and “formalist” understandings of parish, Walther suggests that the contemporary experience of Catholic “parish shopping” is now simply “an established fact of Church life.”
Surmising that the traditional parish model was never really suited to North America, Walther proposes something a bit unexpected: the Costco model.
“Costco is, as I say, the essence of suburbia. When I say that it should replace parishes I do not of course mean the church building should be replaced by an actual shopping center. Instead I envision a number of ersatz oratories, centrally located, where possible in the largest and most attractive former parish churches. Instead of being isolated in scattered rectories, diocesan priests would live a common life on the grounds of the oratories themselves; rather than travel to two or three different “clustered” parish churches, where confession can only be offered for half an hour a week, they would rotate six days a week in the box and at the altar. What Pope Benedict XVI referred to in a similar context as “mutual enrichment” would take place when idealistic, perhaps doctrinally rigid young priests came into contact with gruff old pastors, who might themselves benefit from an occasional dose of romanticism.”
Walther’s proposal is a bit more technical than you might imagine and engages with canon law and some precise distinctions between diocesan and parish life and structures. It’s insider baseball, to be sure. But as an evangelical Protestant, I can’t help but read it all and appreciate the dilemma Walther is identifying. Evangelical Protestantism has had its own parish-based expressions, particularly in colonial America where either Anglicanism or congregationalism dominated (ie. Virginia and New England). Federal disestablishment after Independence and then in stages throughout the early republic certainly changed much of that. But it also strikes me that evangelical Protestantism, by virtue of its emphasis on conversion and the “new birth” necessarily destabilized notions of parish life that were geographic or familial. In fact, that theological emphasis was, in part, what made Baptists and Methodists so capable of their rapid growth in the 19th century as the United States to expand.
The irony, I suspect, is that for many of us evangelical Protestants we are actually trying to unwind the Costco-ification of our own communities and traditions, in which church life has at times been reduced to an entertaining commodified exchange of religious services, but which makes no real demands on participants to follow the way of the risen Christ.
If Walther’s essay interests you (and I think it should!), you may also be curious about James O’Toole’s new book, For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America. I’ve not yet had a chance to read it, but O’Toole is one of the most astute scholars of American Catholicism and I suspect his book will speak to some of the dynamics Walther has identified.
I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing
Cue Steven Tyler’s voice and those images of Bruce Willis… you know you’ve been laying in bed wondering what happens if an asteroid is headed our way. Who actually tracks them? How do they do it? Well, The American Scholar has a fascinating account of the teams that are on the job and some of the new technology at their disposal.
First, of course, the asteroids must be found. To that end, a space telescope currently being built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will search for near-Earth objects in infrared rather than visible light wavelengths, allowing scientists to observe dimly lit asteroids and those closer to the sun. When it launches in 2027, it will help fill in the gap of what is left to be found. And every few years, NASA’S PDCO, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other U.S. government agencies get together to walk through simulated asteroid impact exercises. They are flexing the muscles of a system that might never need to be used, at least in our lifetimes, thanks to planetary defenders like Kelly Fast and David Rankin, along with dozens of their compatriots all around the globe who drive up mountains, open telescopes, and look up, night after night.
Yeah, but does this work? So glad you asked:
So far, scientists have detected 11 small asteroids that later collided with Earth—the latest being an asteroid approximately one meter across that disintegrated harmlessly over Siberia in December 2024. An astronomer first reported the asteroid, the MPC declared it new, JPL’s watchdog calculated its orbit and alerted the community of a potential impact, and follow-up observations refined the orbit. Scientists thus determined ahead of time where it was going to hit and when. Again, the asteroid wasn’t of a size that could have done major damage, but the point is, the system worked.
The heavens really do declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), even when it can be terrifying. Thankfully, our hope is that the God who numbers hairs, feeds bird, and clothes flowers is also the One who ordains the path of every celestial body.
Will the Lord Remember Me?
If you like your Lenten season with a good dose of bluesy gospel melodies and a bit more of a sawdust trail flavor, I think you’ll understand why Red Clay Strays live version of “Will the Lord Remember Me?” has been something of an earworm for me recently. Recorded live at The Ryman, it’s absolutely beautiful.
What I’m Reading
Michael Hiltzik, Golden State: The Making of California (Mariner Books)