Cody Cook

Good info, so-so delivery

Revisado: 11-11-24

I learned a lot about the context surrounding these albums, which was interesting and made this presentation worth a listen.

However, I found the presentation to be a little extra for my tastes--performative and a bit grating. If you don't mind a little theater kid vibe, it shouldn't bother you though.

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Useful guide to the nonviolent Jesus on holy week

Revisado: 04-17-23

Porterfield makes a strong case for Jesus exemplifying nonviolence during this pivotal time in His mission. The author's case against PSA and God's judgment against sin is ancillary, weaker, and probably should have been treated in a separate book.

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A helpful book, especially for its audience

Revisado: 10-09-22

There are a lot of good suggestions in this book, both in terms of the practical side of cleaning house and in how to think about cleaning tasks to avoid unnecessary stress when you inevitably fall behind. Key concepts that I took with me are that the right thing for you is to keep youor space functional without overwhelming you and that the point of cleaning is to make your space work for you and not to "[fulfil] external standards of what you should be doing."

However, it's funny to me that a book which so plainly seeks to be inclusive in its language and outlook can seem so targeted in its demographic. It's hard not to read this book without imagining an audience of white, progressive, upper middle class NPR listening women. Of course, they need good self help advice like the rest of us, but it does create a bit of a barrier for readers outside of that group. In particular, the pathologizing language can seem self-indulgent at times.

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A good start, but short on clear examples

Revisado: 06-13-22

Yancey's approach of collaborative conversations between color blind and anti-racist proponents seems like it could be fruitful, and it is certainly better to listen well than to always be preaching from one's narrow perspective. But I did leave the book wondering what common ground could be reached between someone who thinks that racial disparities are all the fault of whites and that only whites can fix them and someone who sees ongoing disparities as only solvable through blacks taking responsibility. Perhaps conversation can bring them a little closer together and help them both to be more nuanced, but the solutions being proposed are so different that it's hard to imagine how they could be bridged. Yancey suggests an approach to dialogue which seems more humane, but doesn't give enough examples of how this dialogue would solve our problems to give confidence in his solution. So, it's a good book; but it feels incomplete.

The narrator had a great voice, but long gaps between sentences with no background noise made every sentence feel like it was recorded in a different session. Better editing would have made the experience more immersive. The solution to this problem for the listener is to turn the speed up to 1.5x so that the reading is much smoother.

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An unbalanced but important discussion of evangeli

Revisado: 05-21-22

As a libertarian pacifist Christian with a high view of Scripture, I feel that I'm in a unique place to assess Du Mez' book. Many of those she criticizes I would also criticize, though I often find her critiques to be biased toward a progressive viewpoint.

For instance, Du Mez invokes the notions of white supremacy and white power as inseparable from evangelical theology even (especially?) when they are irrelevant to her point and unsupported by argument. This fixation is so strong for her that when conservative evangelical movements do attack racism head on, their failure to do so from a progressive political vantage point counts against their sincerity.

Her bias is seen throughout the book, but perhaps most clearly in the earlier portions of the book where she builds a foundation of a macho mentality in American Christianity to explain the sexual abuse scandals which happened decades later. In these portions, a disconnect can often be found between the primary sources she cites and her analysis of their underlying motivations. For instance, after acknowleding a diversity of evangelical opinion in the first half of the twentieth century on racism, she then asserts that racism is integral to evangelical politics.

But as her account of American evangelicalism's macho mentally develops, a tsunami of credible abuse allegations and insane justifications for them in the mouths of evangelical leaders punctuate her book at regular intervals. Are these grave sins the direct result of "patriarchal" or "complementarian" ideology, or are they the result of deifying leaders so that their enablers fear that they can never be held accountable without also potentially destroying the institutions they lead "which do so much good?"

I am highly suspicious of Du Mez's suggestion that even more soft and moderate forms of complementarianism can be blamed for sexual abuse and cover-up, though more extreme forms, along with pastoral cults of personality, certainly bear some significant blame. Du Mez comes close to suggesting this conclusion herself when highlighting a sex abuse scandal and cover-up from egalitarian pastor Bill Hybels and blaming it on a patriarchal leadership structure within his church.

A less obviously progressive approach to the subject would have been beneficial for persuading the people who need to hear her warnings most but will inevitably be distracted by her less salient and more partisan points. At the core of the biblical argument against "toxic masculinity" and male authority is not an assumptions of progressive political values, but Jesus' upside down worldview wherein the servant is the greatest of all and the one who lords his power over others is a pagan.

That being said, it isn't entirely clear what Du Mez thinks ought to replace John Wayne masculinity among Christian men, nor is she keen on exploring the question of what is so appealing about John Wayne masculinity. Is there something at its core that really does speak uniquely to men as they were created to be, or is the entire project merely appealing to a corrupt cultural vision of manhood or, even worse, our sinful nature? Can a genderless Christianity satisfy whatever it is that cries out in men for fulfillment? Must men become eunuchs for the kingdom?

Despite her clumsy approach to persuading her readers (assuming she does want to persuade those who disagree with her), much of the content of this book is valuable and needs to be known and reflected upon by more evangelicals. One of her most important contentions is that American evangelicalism is chiefly a "cultural and political movement" as opposed to a theological one, and that the culture and politics nearly always wins out over the theology. Another theme which is discussed but under-explored by Du Mez is the way in which a commercialized Christianity shapes the movement and replaces traditional leaders with celebrities and demagogues.

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Wendell Berry meets Friedrich Nietzsche

Revisado: 03-07-22

I've been trying to write more reviews of books I've read. Here's my review of the Unabomber Manifesto by Ted Kaczynski:

Kaczynski argues that the modern technological society satisfies the basic needs and goals of survival. Free market enthusiasts concur, seeing this as one of its great achievements. But Kaczynski sees this as a problem to be fixed and not the solution to hunger and disease that it appears to be.

Why? Because pursuing the goal of survival--hunting, foraging, fighting bears, what have you--makes humans feel fulfilled. When that goal is met for us we are left to pursue surrogate goals that are artificial and less fulfilling (perhaps goals like writing anarcho-primitivist manifestos and sending pipe bombs to strangers?). To quote Ted, it is "demeaning to fulfill one's need for the power process through surrogate activities or through identification with an organization rather than through pursuit of real goals."

In addition to feeling less fulfilled, we also feel less free. The fact that our primary desires are met for us upon the condition that we obey and become properly socialized means that control of our lives is placed into the hands of others--bosses, technocrats, and other organizers of society. In other words, individuals have less control over their own lives in a highly organized technological society but depend upon others. For Kaczynski, freedom is the "opportunity to go through the power process" without control or manipulation.

Kaczynski's solution is to destroy the technological society--all of the things that require specialized knowledge and a division of labor--and go back to pre-industrial society, where humans can go through the "power process" to meet their natural goals and thus be more fulfilled. He's a bit like Wendell Berry meets Friedrich Nietzsche, with a dash of Karl Marx thrown in.

But why stop at our previous social development? Why not go back further, to hunter gatherer societies, ape clans, sea dwellers, or amoebas? Many of us thrive in the technological society that might not have in earlier stages of human development. Maybe some people genuinely like to understand how computers work, to study viruses, or to read the Church Fathers as valuable activities for their own sake and are not all miserably attending to "surrogate activities"--this is one of the beautiful things about the division of labor, isn't it? That I can focus on what I do well, you can focus on what you do well, and we are both doubly enriched for it through trade.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with asking if we may be reaching our limits in some areas. Humans are adaptable, though not infinitely so. Perhaps, for instance, living our lives on social media for the "likes" could be stretching our elastic-like flexibility to the point of breaking. Maybe our dependence on the supply chain, as we've learned post-COVID, can begin to be a liability if too many links in that chain break and we aren't able to take care of ourselves. And maybe our dependence on the financial system is likewise a double-edged sword, as efforts to freeze the assets of Canadian trucker protestors and ordinary Russians in the early months of 2022 also have shown us.

Maybe we should, as John Prine suggested in his song "Spanish Pipedream," blow up our TV and build a home in the country.

But we definitely shouldn't blow up other people.

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One simple narrative for another

Revisado: 03-03-22

Dr. Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood is a largely historical treatment of the complicated history of how women in leadership have been perceived in the church and how this history complicates complementarian narratives that women in leadership is a modern phenomenon grounded in feminist philosophy.

When it comes to that central goal, she’s largely successful.Though she doesn’t deny patriarchy as a rule in medieval Christianity, she does note important examples that go against the absolutism of a strong complementarianism which denies women opportunities to speak in church and argues that the only proper place for a woman is in the home of her husband and children.

Her treatment of the biblical material is the weakest area of this book, which is odd since the people she’s seeking to persuade–evangelical Christians–are more interested in living their lives informed by the Bible than they are medieval Catholic history. For this demographic, her historical studies will be an interesting diversion, but they won’t persuade them to change their opinion about women in ministry. Somehow she doesn’t seem to give much consideration to this point, as is evidenced by her claim that evangelicals take the biblical interpretations of complementarian John Piper so seriously because they lack historical insight–as if medieval history is the lens through which we should be reading the Bible.

Instead of seeking to establish her view on the basis of Scripture, she partly blames Christian sexism on inerrancy. In doing so, she gives up the game. Christians trying to be faithful to Scripture will decide that there is nothing for them in her arguments and she will ultimately persuade the NPR tote bag carrying ex-vangelicals who already agree with her. That demographic will nod solemnly as she cites disputed data about gender pay gaps and makes (though never supports) the claim that patriarchy cannot be disentangled from racism. She is of course aware that patriarchy pre-dates modern racism by millenia and that it is still practiced by non-white people and cultures, but this doesn’t seem to cause her to question this progressive platitude.

Where she does treat the biblical data, her strongest arguments have to deal with those “household code” passages that encourage women to be respectful in church and to their husbands. The context of these passages, she argues, is that the equality that men and women are offered in Christ, and which Paul himself testifies to in Galatians 3:28, was scandalous in a patriarchal society so Paul wanted to contain that scandal by encouraging orderly and polite behavior. Paul incidentally makes these same arguments to slaves and those who suffered under oppressive governments. In other words, culturally-situated recommendations for behavior to avoid scandalizing the gospel (especially in cultures where that scandal could literally be a life or death issue) do not undermine fundamental equality between the sexes.

The most frustrating element of the book is Barr’s own either/or absolutizing which mirrors the mentality of the complementarians she’s critiquing. Examples of this mindset include:

Treating complementarianism as synonymous with patriarchy generally despite the fact that many complementarians take much more moderate views about women’s roles in society than secular sexists do.

Her assertion that complementarianism and sexual abuse are closely linked, despite praising the egalitarian wife of an egalitarian pastor who had his own sex scandals which broke two years before this book was published. She doesn’t mention this fact, though she is careful to clear her throat to mention Kevin Spacey’s #metoo moments when briefly mentioning his film The Usual Suspects.

Where extreme complementarians want to see women finding fulfillment in domestic life alone, Barr seems to elevate fulfillment through modern work above domestic fulfillment, a very contemporary white feminist view much more deeply rooted in Betty Friedan (whom she mentions approvingly) than in Scripture. She chastises the “cult of domesticity” as a modern phenomenon despite Paul’s own encouragement to young women to “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God” (Titus 2:4-5). While this command is at least partly rooted in concerns for respectability, Paul does seem to see this as a worthy calling for women. Of course, as Barr points out, it is not the only calling for women. Paul himself praises women eschewing family life to dedicate themselves to God (1 Corinthians 7).

Barr dishonestly calls the common complementarian view that the Son obeyed the Father from eternity the Arian heresy. But Arius’ heresy was not that He believed the Son obeyed the Father, but that the Son was created by the Father and thus not fully divine in the same way that the Father is. Barr and other egalitarians claim that this difference in roles necessarily means a difference in natures, but that is precisely the question under dispute. Complementarians believe that two distinct groups of people can, in some cases at least, be equal in nature but serve different functions. Barr is begging the question here by asserting that Arianism simply is eternal submission when what point needs to be supported.


Reading Barr’s book as someone who feels pulled between a soft complementarianism and a soft egalitarianism, I found some of her points to be very persuasive and others not so much.

On the one hand, I of course support a strong political egalitarianism where women may choose to work, marry, or not marry as they please. I also agree with her that the absolutism of extreme complementarians doesn’t represent the biblical witness to women prophesying in church, planting churches, leading in various capacities, working outside the home, and rejecting marriage to remain virgins committed to serving God. There is indeed a kind of “cult of domesticity” which treats family life as the primary mode of Christian existence which not only contradicts the words of Jesus and Paul, but their own lives! Many women have pursued professional life to the benefit of others and with a sense of personal fulfillment. These are good things.
 
On the other hand, might there also be real differences between men and women which could play out organically as general (though not absolute) distinctions within society? Barr agrees with complementarian Albert Mohler that patriarchy is the default for human society, but argues that this is purely and simply the result of human sin. But maybe patriarchy’s universality is a form of sinful excess (as Barr states) that’s rooted in something more real (as Mohler claims)–biological differences between men and women. These differences may have been particularly visible when played out over the backdrop of pre-modern society where the unique strengths and functions of men and women contributed to their playing distinct roles in their survival (women domestic and men otherwise); but in modern western society, where most kinds of work are not gendered and pregnancy has less impact on a woman’s ability to do them, sex distinctions may seem old-fashioned and largely irrelevant. But that doesn’t make them non-existent.
 
In fact, one significant feminist argument for abortion is that it equalizes men and women by neutralizing one of the things that impairs women’s ability to compete–the “burden” of pregnancy. The modern invention of birth control also creates a distance between women and their natural connection to motherhood, creating a practical interchangeability between men and women in most kinds of work–though not all kinds. While feminists often complain about the lack of women in STEM and upper management jobs, they are largely silent about the fact that women are still under-represented in less appealing physical labor jobs. Feminism today, much like it was under Betty Friedan, is still largely concerned with the wants of affluent white women.
 
In privileging the cult of professionalism over the cult of domesticity, Barr is likely to incur pushback from complementarian men and women who see something sacred in motherhood that they believe is under attack in egalitarian’s push to get women to “fulfill [their] profession” instead of “[staying] home and [baking] cookies,” as Hillary Clinton once quipped.
 
Is it telling that some of Barr’s examples of medieval egalitarian heroines are women who abandoned their children or husbands to pursue what they perceived as a greater fulfillment in a higher spiritual calling? Isn't this the complementarian fear: that families will be destroyed in the wake of mothers trailblazing their own paths outside of the home? While there are no biblical injunctions against women pursuing work (and in fact positive examples of it), concerns about kids growing up in daycare while their parents pursue other kinds of self-fulfillment aren't solely borne out of disingenuous misogyny, despite the cynical assertions of Barr and other egalitarians.
 
Women who want to reject marriage and motherhood, either because they feel called by God to some other vocation or because they would prefer (for whatever reason, whether pragmatic or self-indulgent) to engage in professional work, should of course be welcome to do so. But they also shouldn't crap on women who find real value and fulfillment in God-designed functions like motherhood that are distinctly female. While Barr doesn’t go full Hillary, it’s hard not to read in her words a rejection of one kind of cult and a subtle promotion of another.
 
Despite my critiques here, Barr’s work is not all bad. The historical data she covers is fascinating and points to a more complicated narrative about women and their work. My primary issue is that she seems to be substituting her own simple narrative to combat the one offered by extreme complementarianism.

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I liked it!

Revisado: 11-10-21 El oyente recibió este título gratis

But then again, I wrote it. I'm really just reviewing for the excellent narrator who did a fantastic job.

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Uncharacteristically uncurious at times

Revisado: 06-21-21

Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquistors: The New Attacks on Free Thought was originally published in 1995, but its analysis of two opposite but dangerous trends which he noticed even then, to either silence free thought or treat all opinions as equally valid, could be seen as prescient in light of the recent uptick in campus censorship and even violent acts against those presenting views which challenge the academic progressive consensus.

Rauch’s suggestion is that we should not arbitrate our disputes with violence, nor should we condescend to treat every opinion as just as good as every other opinion. Instead, we should allow gatekeepers invested in the process of discovery to set the terms for the debate. For example, while creationists and scientific racists should not be silenced through the state, they can probably be safely ignored in the public square if the scientific community (those who should know something about this issue and have a process by which the popular view may be challenged by promising upstarts) is unmoved by their pronouncements.

While Rauch’s denouncement of state violence and censorship is commendable, his optimism about the process of critical engagement is at least partly unwarranted. Rauch himself seems to know this on some level as his critiques are often aimed at academia’s unwillingness to budge on its echo-chambering of liberal orthodoxy. This scholarly rigidity to challenges has arguably only gotten worse in recent years as we’ve seen more silencing and physical attacks on college campuses upon perceived ideological enemies (for instance, https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/index.html), often with the tacit or vocal support of the administration. Apart from these more extreme examples, there is also an implicit silencing that happens as the result of efforts to protect political sacred cows; for example, the trend in sex studies to uncritically accept the sometimes questionable orthodoxies of transgender activists (https://reason.com/podcast/2020/08/19/debra-soh-the-end-of-gender).

Of course, none of this changes the fact that free inquiry is still the best means of getting a society closer to truth. It only shows that a culture of rejecting free inquiry can interfere with even the most rigorous processes.

This brings me to another flaw in the book: its uncharacteristic uncuriosity about the process of inquiry and rejection of violence in the Christian tradition.

Rauch connects Christian faith with “the fundamentalist social rule,” that is: “those who know the truth should decide who opinion is right.” He cites Paul’s exhortation in his epistle to the Romans, that God would be right in judging all of us since all of us “suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Romans 1:18-19, NASB) as an example of this fundamentalist social rule. In Rauch’s reading, Paul’s statement is one which stands behind the later “killing, torture, and repression of people who perversely, ‘by their wickedness,’ denied evident truth. Certainly there can be no right to say what is false and what you know is false.”

But is this actually what Paul is saying? This is the same Paul who, eleven chapters later, urges Christians to bless those who persecute them and never avenge or repay evil for evil (12:14-21). Could he be suggesting that Christians should dominate the public square and silence their opponents? No, this is not the course of action that Paul favored. Instead, he went into the public square and argued openly, with pagans by appealing to his day’s philosophical knowledge and with Jews by appealing to the Hebrew Bible. He did not engage in silencing or even suggest that he favored it. That’s what his theologically Jewish and pagan opponents did. Paul was arrested, beaten–sometimes almost to death, and finally killed by the state for freely speaking against and publicly debating the orthodoxies of his time.

Similarly, while the church which gained secular power often abused it by playing politics and silencing–even killing–its opponents, Christianity also has a rich history of non-violence and a suspicion of political power. To begin at the beginning, the early church’s theologians were virtually universally pacifists. After a period of tradition displacing scripture, the church began to revisit the Bible again and restore it to the people in the 16th century. When this happened, a large and outspoken contingent of Christians, called Anabaptists, followed the early church’s model and rejected political power and violence as well.

This is not to say that in the intervening centuries the process of inquiry disappeared. Even the medieval church had a tradition of carefully reading two books–the one being scripture and the other the so-called book of nature–both which came from God. This belief that nature points to God’s creative glory spurred on the Scientific Revolution as Christians believed that the universe reflected a divine creative intent and wanted to know it’s creator better (for further reading, check out Principe’s The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction and Hannam’s The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution).

In addition to this careful reading of the book of nature, a process for reading the book of scripture was also developed that closely parallels the scientific method–hermeneutics. In other words, rules were developed that allowed readers to read the Bible for understanding its authors’ original intent and allowed Christians interpreters to challenge one another to read more carefully.

In other words, despite a tragic history of fundamentalist thinking, Christianity also has not only a deep foundation, but a rich tradition, of rejecting violence and promoting free inquiry.

Finally, Rauch’s contention that religious belief is relegated to the private realm, and therefore that good scientists may appeal to faith for emotional help in private but that it should not influence their scientific work, begs the question. If there are any questions which Christian faith seeks to answer that can be checked using public methods of inquiry and criticism (and there are), then those questions cannot be segregated to the realm of the private. They can and should be put to open inquiry.

While Kindly Inquisitors is an important book on this topic, if one only has time to read one, Haidt and Lukianoff’s more recent The Coddling of the American Mind not only builds on Rauch’s ideas with strong arguments and good research, it’s also more persuasive at making a case for a community of inquiry that’s open to all–even Christians.

Jillette's narration is great, but seems to have been recorded at different times. He seems to randomly go from speaking loudly to reading quietly, as if he's trying not to wake the engineer.

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The softer side of Calvinism

Revisado: 03-31-21

For devotional literature, this book is surprisingly not lame. Its use of Puritan writing in particular gives it some grounding in the past and helps to swerve it away from the hoke of most contemporary popular Christian writing.

As for its theology, it presents a softer side of Calvinism. Though reformed, Ortlund emphasizes the doctrine of perseverance more than the more familiar and harsher Calvinist doctrines of limited atonement and the predestination of some to damnation. As such, the book's errors are primarily the errors of Calvinism: in particular, the idea that if you're elect, nothing you do can lead to forfeiting your salvation. This is meant to be comforting. If you are struggling with sin or doubting your salvation, rest easy knowing that nothing can remove you from the safe hands of the Lord. Of course, if you ever do lose your faith and die in a state of unbelief, then you weren't really saved to begin with.

Ortlund also wants his readers to know that at core God is not wrathful but merciful. But if God is primarily merciful and desires at heart to forgive, why would He pre-determine the damnation of billions of human beings?

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