Devotional Pieces from the Psalms and Job by Anna Barbauld

Book & Film Reviews, Reading Scripture / By

Anna Barbauld, born in 1743 to Presbyterian parents, was a British poet and essayist who rejected detached, rationalistic interpretation of Scripture. From a young age she exhibited a love of learning and prodded her theologian and classicist father to teach her Greek and Latin. She published several works ranging from hymns, children’s literature, statements on women’s issues to objections against the use of Scripture to support slavery. Barbauld’s love of poetry gave her a particular appreciation for the Psalms. In Devotional Pieces Compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job: To Which Are Prefixed Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishment she argues for the importance of emotion in the reading and study of Scripture. After presenting her thesis the book comprises a collection of select Psalms. Below are quotes from Devotional Pieces that give us a window into the mind of a Christian thinker squaring off against the rationalistic Enlightenment trends of her time:

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Overcoming the Guilt of Saying No

Discernment & Decision-Making, Pastors and Christian Leaders, Work/Life Balance / By

I had planned to attend a one-day leadership conference today. It has an impressive line-up of speakers and a range of topics I am excited about, things like “Practices of Leading for the Long Haul” and “Leading with Resilience.” Another presentation covers “Mental Health and Resilience in Ministry.” It’s exactly what I need right now. So, why am I not there? Truth be told, I’m exhausted. I couldn’t bring myself to make the four-hour round-trip drive.

This past year, I took on a second job to help a nonprofit in need that is a making a profound difference in people’s lives. But in the process, I added more work to an already full plate. Significantly, I made this decision at the very moment I was striving toward work/life balance. Over and over, I find myself say yes when I should be saying no.

A variety of reasons contribute to an inability to say no, including:

  • Guilt for saying no because we want to please other people.
  • Excitement at the prospect of a new adventure.
  • Desire to contribute to a good cause.
  • Not wanting to miss out on anything.
  • Discomfort sitting with grief that comes with selectivity.
  • Addiction to adrenaline.
  • Compulsion to achieve to bolster self-esteem and status.
  • Workaholism out of pure enjoyment of working (“work is play”).

As I watched the clock tick past the point of no return when I could no longer arrive at the leadership conference in time, I felt guilt. I felt grief. Guilt for failing to follow through on a commitment. Grief because I didn’t want to miss out. And yet, I made the right choice. I needed to say no.

Feelings of guilt and grief at saying no can obscure the truth of victory. Today I overcame a compulsion to over-do, and yet it didn’t feel good. Paradoxically, adrenaline that comes from workaholism does feels good. I’m addicted to adrenaline. I love the feeling of a new adventure. I hate missing out. I want to do all the things. I love going, going, and going. And yet it’s killing me. Literally, workaholism and the frenetic American pace is damaging our bodies.

Recently, I read with interest the journey of Kirsten Powers who wrote an essay entitled, “The way we live in the United States is not normal.” Powers, who is a CNN senior political analyst and a USA Today columnist announced plans to move to Italy.  She is literally leaving the country to combat workaholism. She writes:

“I started to have a dawning awareness that we don’t have to live this way. I also began to notice how calm I felt in Italy for extended periods, even when working from there, so it wasn’t due to being on vacation. I could feel my nervous system settle. I noticed how I began to find the famous Italian inefficiency charming. It was a kind of quiet rebuke to the productivity fetish in the United States, where businesses are forever trying to ‘optimize’ and ‘streamline’ to please their shareholders and enrich their CEOs while making life increasingly miserable for their employees.”

The fact that some of us need to leave the country to achieve work/life balance tells us how difficult it can be to make changes to one’s lifestyle in American culture. For the workaholic or the adrenaline junkie, living in the United States is like trying to lose weight while living in a cake shop or trying to get sober while living in bar. Believe it or not, some places in the world have a saner tempo built into the cultural fabric itself.

But that’s little consolation for someone like me who is married and caring for an elderly father-in-law. I can’t just uproot and move across the ocean, not if I want to keep my family together. And even if I could, I don’t really want to move to a new country and start over. I want to figure out how to be sustainable here.

I can’t say I’ve figured it out yet. But success often looks like getting back on the wagon again and again. It’s counting the small victories like the one I had this morning when I said “no.” No, I’m not going to make that four-hour round-trip drive, even for something good. Instead, I will pay attention to my feelings of guilt and grief and speak the truth to them, “It’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to savor one experience instead of ten. It’s okay to sit with small, but necessary ‘losses’ of opportunity. Take a deep breath and enjoy the calm.”

Note: In case you are wondering, yes, I plan to let go of my second job. It was always intended to be temporary. for a year or two. After this past year of trying to do too much, I’ve decided not to extend the second job any longer. God willing, by January, we’ll have a replacement. Hold me to it!

Review: A Leopard Tamed by Eleanor Vandevort

Book & Film Reviews, Pastors and Christian Leaders, Reconstructing Faith / By

I grew up on missionary stories. My bookshelf was full of them, and they inspired my dreams that, one day, I would follow in the footsteps of these godly heroes.  Foreign mission work was a rare avenue open to women in my conservative Christian world, and I had no doubt God had called me to full-time service. But missing from my bookshelf was a story published in 1968 called A Leopard Tamed by Eleanor “Van” Vandevort. Given that Van became best friends with Elisabeth Elliot in college and both embarked on their missions around the same time, it might seem odd that Elisabeth was on my bookshelf while Van was not.

What I didn’t know was that Christian bookstores treated A Leopard Tamed differently than Elliot’s book Through the Gates of Splendor. Van’s book was uncomfortably honest about hard questions. Churchgoers preferred glorified missionary tales. But despite the initial chilly reception, Van’s book is making a comeback, thanks to recent biographies on Elisabeth Elliot (see here and here). The biographies refer to Van, bringing her into the limelight. Maybe now the Christian world is ready to hear her wisdom. Evangelical publisher Hendrickson bet on greater receptivity when it published a 50th anniversary edition of her book in 2018.

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Why You Should Watch The Zone of Interest

Book & Film Reviews, Ethics / By
Zone of Interest picture.

Last night, I watched the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, and I can still feel it in my gut. It taps into present concerns as I survey the political and social landscape of my country and the world at large. Theologically, the film reminds us of what many religions have long asserted—depravity lurks in the human heart. “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom 3:1-12; NIV; see also Isa 53). Human atrocity is not perpetrated by “monsters,” but by ordinary people.

A Holocaust movie unlike any other I’ve seen, The Zone of Interest, is a horror film without the typical gore. The terror is in watching ordinary people live next to and participate in great evil—literally right next door. The film portrays, with considerable accuracy, the life of the Höss family who lived at Auschwitz. The father, Rudolf, was a commandant at the concentration camp and the mastermind of mass murder. While he “goes to the office” every day, his wife Hedwig and their children enjoy a luxurious life with death trains, gunshots, and burning bodies just beyond their peaceful garden wall.

In the film, Holocaust victims are not visible. We don’t see starving bodies, the squalor of the camp, the piles of shoes whose owners have been brutally killed. But we hear terror. The film juxaposes the visual beauty of the landscape and the mundane serenity of the Höss home with the sounds of violence—the victims’ screams, the yelling of guards, the trains, and most disturbing of all the film’s overall soundtrack, created by sound designer Johnnie Burn, composer Mica Levi, and sound mixer Tarn Willers. We are accostumed to films using visual elements to shock our sensibilities, which can leave us desensitized to cinematically portrayed violence. Instead, The Zone of Interest uses sound to incredible effect. In this way, the victims’ reality remains very present throughout. In fact, the soundtrack was so effective, it was difficult to bear at times.

Over the years, I’ve often wrestled with how the Holocaust could happen. I look at old photos of SS employees hanging out, laughing, and playing instruments after work as if they had just clocked out of their job at a car factory. Similarly, I see old lynching photos of white American fathers and mothers and youth smiling before the camera in front of dangling, mutilated Black bodies, even taking body parts home as souvenirs. It boggles the mind.

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Movie Review: The Book of Clarence by Jeymes Samuel

Book & Film Reviews, Reconstructing Faith / By
Film cover of Book of Clarence

At first, I didn’t want to watch The Book of Clarence (2023). A hasty glance at the description made me assume the film would regurgitate low budget movies on the life of Jesus, except using Black actors this time. But my spouse thought it looked intriguing, so we watched it last night. And I’m glad we did. The film is thought-provoking and creative, presenting the gospel in a way that shatters tired and redundant versions. The movie is full of unexpected twists and turns, but the last scene brings it home in a wonderful way.

Clarence, played by LaKeith Stanfield, is a midrash on the speculated twin brother of Jesus’s disciple, Thomas, who the Bible indicates was also called Didymus (“twin” in Greek). But unlike Thomas who follows the Messiah, Clarence is a trouble-maker, dealing weed, lusting after women, and pursuing ill-gotten gain. He even hatches a plot to become a “messiah” himself, not to save anyone else, but to gain power, status, and wealth. Clarence travels to see Jesus’s mother Mary to ask how Jesus does all his “tricks,” so as to learn them himself. Mary (Alfre Woodard), a white-haired sage, makes it clear that Jesus is no trickster. Jesus is the real deal.

But Clarence remains unconvinced God exists, let alone a true Messiah, and so he persists in his fraudulent ruse. Clarence manages to persuade many that he is the Messiah, filling his coffers with money. But the more he gets what he wants, the more he realizes that all the money and status fail to satisfy him the way he expects. This provides a subtle existential window that prompts him to look more closely at himself. At one point in the movie he looks into a mirror and asks, “Who am I? What have I become?”

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How to Practice Digital Minimalism

Reconstructing Faith, Work/Life Balance / By

One of the best books I’ve read lately is Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (which I reviewed previously). I’m now practicing what he preached, having almost completed the thirty-day break from social media to discern my philosophy of technology. In what ways do my values guide why and how I use tech?

Turning Reflex into Intentionality

Two things I noticed right away as I unplugged: first, relief from the constant stimulation of scrolling and, paradoxically, a reflex to grab my phone and scroll. I found myself reaching for my phone without even thinking about it, especially, when fatigued from work or bored. I became particularly attuned to this reflex after deleting distracting apps. I was left staring at the screen, looking for something to click and, with no app there, I suddenly realized what I was doing.

Two weeks in, the reflex was still there. Instead of social media apps, I started clicking on news links and Substack (the one app I hadn’t deleted yet). So, I deleted the Substack app, then re-downloaded it, then deleted it again, waffling back and forth. I finally got a grip on my news scrolling with the Feedly app that allows me to curate news more intentionally. I’m still tinkering with it, filtering out news I don’t need. And if that app becomes a distraction, I’ll delete it from my phone as well.

Deleting distracting apps from my phone has been essential. I will never again download a social media app onto my phone. Any social media use will be intentionally scheduled and take place on my laptop, where I’m less inclined to check it as frequently. The same with any other app that I reflexively, rather than intentionally, use.

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Review: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Book & Film Reviews, Reconstructing Faith, Work/Life Balance / By

When two different friends on the same day recommended Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, I immediately bought the book. Not only because it came recommended, but also because the title was calling my name. I have a love/hate relationship with social media and other tech. Social media, particularly, has caused me problems: anxiety, loss of time, distractability, and difficulty reading books (even though books are my passion). I often want to quit social media and throw out my smartphone, but abandoning tech entirely doesn’t seem to be the answer. What to do? Digital Minimalism charts a path forward.

As Newport lays out, the goal is not to stop using technology; the goal is to have a philosophy for why and how one uses it. Importantly, “fasting” from tech doesn’t typically work. I’ve done this in the past. I even deleted my Facebook account for six months of blissful serenity a couple years ago. But the benefits of tech wooed me back. What I lacked was a philosophy for the why and how of tech. Newport suggests not merely a detox for a short period but a “decluttering.” This involves getting in touch with our values and discerning how tech use is congruent with our broader life goals.

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