Christian Realism

The Christian Realists are a pretty loose group. I found the group through mutual friends, Matthew Winslow and Paul Christian Glenn, fellow lovers of the group Daniel Amos. Matt and Paul were on a number of DA lists that I was on, and I found out that they were over here being all creative and stuff. I discovered X-real at a time in my life when I had founded and killed off two side businesses in two years and was disillusioned with depending on other people to help me realize my dearest visions.

As a typical guy, I had it all backward, reaching for my dreams before asking God about it. I thought to actually ask God what my vision should be only after the two failed endeavors, but he didn’t hold it against me. What he did was so astonishing that it changed my life. He returned to me something I’d long since forgotten, my oldest and dearest dream, creative writing. However, this being God and all, he put a fresh spin on it, giving me the idea of combining my love for God, my love for fiction writing, and my love for sci-fi and fantasy.

He did this through a couple of people, one of whom is our own Paul Christian Glenn. At the time, Paul had a menial job (this is referred to in the business as “understatement”) and yet he had written and was directing and co-producing his own film, Jaqueline Rose, a small character-driven story that takes place literally where he lives in the heartland of America.

It occurred to me that if Paul could serve the Lord with his interests and gifts, maybe I could as well.

It was a heady thought.

When I first hit the old Christian Realists site, one of the sluglines that was brainstormed at the time was an expression that I first found somewhat incendiary, taken by itself, “piety kills the creative mind”, a line from well-known writer Flannery O’Connor. I dug a little deeper into the site and read what these folks were all about.

Talk about an oasis in a desolate land.

It was as if these people were reading my mail, were long-lost brothers and sisters I didn’t know I had. I felt immediately attuned to what they were all about, and asked if I could be a part of the list.

I felt I had come home, that these creative, devout people understood the God I love and serve, and understood how to do that in a genuine way. I have been challenged, inspired, enriched, and accountable to these folks, and my writing life has become that of a journeyman as I seek to improve my craft and deepen my relationship with God.

So what does that incendiary slugline mean?

All I can tell you is what it means to me.

By way of preface, there are three common definitions for piety:
pi·e·ty
n. pl. pi·e·ties

1. The state or quality of being pious, especially:
a. Religious devotion and reverence to God.
b. Devotion and reverence to parents and family: filial piety.
2. A devout act, thought, or statement.
3. A position held conventionally or hypocritically, or a statement of such a position

To be fair, the quote can be easily taken the wrong way if one doesn’t read all the definitions. Also, this is the sort of quote that begs to be unpacked in context, and this is where the DA connection pops back up. While it was penned from Flannery O’Connor, a name that carries its own pedigree, I highly suspect that it comes from none other than Terry Taylor, one of the most respected Christian singer-songwriters out there, co-founder and frontman for Daniel Amos. Here’s an interview with Terry where he discusses what the O’Connor quote means to him and the maturation process that occurred for him and DA as they began with well-intentioned (but spiritually adolescent) records like their self-titled debut (1976, “Jesus Is Jehovah To Me” , “Abidin’”, “Don’t Light Your Own Fire”) and Shotgun Angel (1977, “Praise Song”, “Father’s Arms”, “Meal”, “Shotgun Angel”, “He’s Gonna Do A Number On You”). Taylor’s lyrics and DA’s musicianship grew exponentially over the years, as did the spiritual maturity of the members of the band, until they reached a place, 20 years later, where their earliest efforts are a little cringe-worthy. The band’s latest studio release is a two-disc tour-de-force entitled Mr. Buechner’s Dream, and extends over 33 songs and ground that is both old and new. Brian Quincy Newcomb starts his review of MBD like this:

When Terry Taylor sings “There may not ever be anything new here to say/But I’m fond of finding words that say it in a different way,” he’s explaining how his band Daniel Amos survived over 25 years on the margins of Christian music. A veteran of the Jesus Movement, Daniel Amos formed in the mid-1970s and quickly became one of the bright spots in this emerging genre. But, as Taylor continues in “Ribbons and Bows,” on the band’s first studio disc in seven years, “We’ve got some gates to crash/We’ve got a fire to light/Burn down the pious trash.”

With Mr. Buechner’s Dream, Daniel Amos continues its musical legacy in grand style, serving up 33 songs spread across two discs. It continues to celebrate the Christian faith and the amazing grace at its core, but also burst the bubbles of those who want to over-simplify by robbing Christian art of its innate honesty. Inspired by novelist Frederick Buechner and the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers, the band wants to tell the whole truth about life and faith, the paradoxes and the process—and do so in fine rock ’n’ roll fashion.

I mention all that to bring us to an interview with Terry at the Mars Hill Review in 1996 (five years before he wrote MBD) in which he touches on some of those same themes, and perhaps helps us to understand things a little better:

Mars Hill Review: You went from singing straight-ahead Christian songs in the early years of Daniel Amos to creating much more oblique, challenging songs. That change blew many fans, who wanted their dogma reinforced, right out of the water.

Terry Taylor: I have to agree with Flannery O’Connor. She said, “Piety kills the creative mind.” I think a lot of our early records contained
a lot of piety and a sort of “God is our lock, stock, and barrel” mentality. It was a reflection of what I knew at the time and what I could write about then. But as my experience has increased-I mean, I’m forty-five years old now-I’ve come to the place of recognizing there
is mystery involved, not only in human existence but in God himself.

God gives us enough of himself so that he is knowable to some degree, yet there is much about him that is unknowable. I think my current
music is an exploration of that theme.

MHR: That builds on a quote I recently read in a Madeleine L’Engle book: “A comprehended God is no God.”

TT: Exactly. What makes a song powerful is the exploration of that mystery. The audience that Daniel Amos has now is one that senses a
certain degree of transparency in my writing-a transparency that says, “I don’t have it all down. I don’t have all knowledge.”

The Bible isn’t simply an instruction book, but an exploration of God’s character and how it relates to us and the way we live our lives. So I think the music’s themes now are much more infused with the searching spirit. This doesn’t negate the fact that Christ has redeemed. But the riches of God know no limits. I believe as a writer that it is essential for me to explore those mysteries and treasures.

This brings us back to the Christian Realists. This group is peopled with creative sorts who love God, and want to do that authentically. The O’Connor quote isn’t meant to challenge God or demean other people, but to challenge those aspects of Christianaity that get in the way of each of us loving God through our creative works and artistic pursuits.

In short, it’s meant to challenge ourselves. Think of it as “false worship interferes with genuine worship”, and you’re on the right track.

If there is a posture involved with this, it is that of the artist kneeling before God, asking him to work through them.

This is something I can believe in, something sincere and basic and true, the polar opposite of pretension.

Our own Matthew Winslow has an e-mail .sig line that goes something like this:

Calls for subversion are fundamentally off-base,
because they don’t produce the dangerous stuff.
They produce what the ‘cutting edge’ fondly
imagines subverts the beliefs of the little old
lady in a small town, so the readers can read it
and feel smugly morally superior to her.
–Mary Catelli

That led to him posting the link to this essay by Tom Simon’s blog.

Following are my initial comments to the Simon essay:

That’s a long, rambling essay, but, wow.

I liked the bit where he said that if subversion is digging a hole underneath something so that it finally falls apart under its own weight. However, in a culture of subversion, once something has fallen, how do you continue to be subversive? If you have dug a hole and your target has fallen, continuing to be subversive simply means digging a bigger hole, which seems destructive and silly.

No, the answer is that the radical thing to do then is construction, building something fresh to take the place of the thing that fell.

He coins a word for this, “superversive”:
“In such a state, there is only one way to make a difference. You cannot subvert ruins; but you can build right over top of them. If to subvert is to destroy a thing from below, might we not coin an opposite word? We could destroy a state of ruin from above, and, as I like to say, supervert it. Where people have abandoned their standards, we could suggest new ones (or reintroduce whatever was good and useful in the old). Where institutions have been abolished, we could institute others to do their work. Above all, we could instil the ideas of creation and structure and discipline into human minds and hearts, and especially the hearts of the young.”

The author goes on to laud the benefits of imagination in the face of subversion, and that’s where we come in. When we employ what I’ll call sanctified imagination, we can be superversive, building up where our humanistic sci-fi peers have been tearing down (Timothy Zahn does this in _Angelmass_), and tearing down where our humanistic sci-fi peers have been building up (humanistic sci-fi types love to write about mankind becomes gods - we should deflate that and write about mankind coming to accept the genuine article).

This is a fascinating topic, and is worth some good, hard thought.

I came across the following in an email this morning:

Reality is subjective, after all (a
lesson from my 11th grade English class) and people see things
differently.

Unfortunately, I see too much of this these days. And it seems that the Christian response is to bludgeon everyone in sight (and many who aren’t) with the objectivity of reality, never really addressing what the wrong thinking above actually is. Or, in other words, we try to cure the disease by addressing the symptoms.

As I see it, the problem with the above sentiment is that it is confusing reality and perception. Perception is subjective; reality isn’t. Were reality subjective, then we ourselves, a portion of reality would be creating that which we ourselves are. Can the creation create itself? Of course not. Thus, reality cannot be subjective. (Or, if it is, the subject is outside of reality.)

But I can agree wholeheartedly that our perception of reality is subjective. Look at the diversity of life. The objective reality is that we have diverse life on planet Earth. How we perceive that diversity is subjective. I, one who believes in creation ex nihilo by a supreme being, attribute it to a reflection of the aforementioned creator and thus see the glory of God manifest in His creation. An atheistic evolutionist, however, sees random chance totally devoid of any superior being. We’re perceiving the same reality, but perceiving it differently, because we are two different subjects. It’s easy to use short-hand and say that reality itself is different for us, but that’s not true: we’ve both begun with the same objective reality. The difference is in how we interpret that reality.

Any desire to engage the world and the church meaningfully is going to have to start with the realization that (a) reality is objective and (b) it must be perceived in order to be discussed so that (c) there are many subjective interpretations at play. The Creator may be objective; we aren’t. For us to pretend we are is to set ourselves up as God, which is not a good thing.

IT experts predict fully self-aware and conscious computers by 2020,
holograms a lá Star Trek by about the same time, and complete brain
downloads by mid-century.

Where is this going, and what should be the Christian’s approach?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/index.html

Inspired by Joe Queenan, over the last two months I have attempted to resist dehumanization from faceless corporations. Up until this time, my rage against the machine has consisted of one futile, passive-aggressive act: any junk mail received with a postage-paid reply envelope is stuffed into said envelope and mailed back to the sending company. But lately I have tried to assert myself when mistreated; likewise, I have made an extra effort to pay compliments where they are due. But most of all, I’ve tried to have fun with the process.

The results have been impressive. Most companies, I’ve found, will bend over backwards to keep their customers happy. A quick note to Taco Bell about being trapped in a drive-thru lane for 15 minutes yielded two free meals. A complimentary letter to Old Wisconsin Sausage about the taste of their Original Summer Sausage resulted in a very nice letter in response, and several coupons. And I’ve had several fruitful conversations as a result of answering questions like, “how was everything?” and “did you find everything you wanted?” with thoughtful honesty, instead of blowing them off with meaningless non-answers.

Some companies, though, don’t learn. And none more evil, more inhuman, than Gannett News. A few weeks ago we received a self-congratulatory letter from the Appleton Post-Crescent. It boasted of a recent “Newspaper of the Year” award, and said we would receive complimentary delivery of the paper for the first week of May. I sent the following e-mail to customer service, and CCed the managing editor and the circulation manager:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Yesterday I received a letter announcing the Post-Crescent was voted Newspaper of the Year in Wisconsin. At least I assume the letter was intended for me: my name is not, in fact, “Resident,” but enough purveyors of credit cards and coupons call me such that I’ve come to accept it as a nickname for “Joshua.” In any case, congratulations on your win. I fully expected the Green Bay Press-Gazette to be voted Newspaper of the Year in Wisconsin after its success in crushing Gannett’s only local competing daily in the entire country. To somehow top that is most impressive.

But as proud as I am of my home-town paper, I must decline the offer of complimentary delivery from May 2nd through May 8th. Lacking a bird, and therefore a birdcage to line, I have no use for a daily collection of announcements, weather listings, classified advertisements, sales fliers, and high school sports scores, nor the thin veneer of wire service news stories it comes wrapped in. And I fear, were seven complimentary issues of the Post-Crescent delivered, I would feel compelled to return them.

So I request that you not deliver the paper to my house. I don’t feel like driving across town to drop them off in your parking lot: please don’t drop them off in my driveway.

Best regards,
Joshua “Resident” Ellis

Someone must have read the e-mail, because we did not receive any issues of the Post Crescent. But in an amazing demonstration of poor attention to detail, last Friday we received another letter from the Post Crescent, again addressed to Resident. This second letter started with, “We hope you enjoyed your complimentary subscription to the Post-Crescent…” It went on to describe the many ways life would improve if we took advantage of their special limited-time offer for home delivery.

Part of me wants to write an even snarkier letter, and send it to the Opinions column. At minimum I will write the Post-Crescent, ask to be removed from their mailing list, and include a vague threat about the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. Not that it matters much, as we are moving in 10 weeks. But this episode has shown me that the evil of faceless corporations is matched only by their stupidity: one must be ever-vigilant, but continued effort can improve things.

Over on Making Light, there’s an interesting thread on common problems of fictional world building. If you are at all interested in SF/F and the problems of world building, check it out.

The trailer for the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie is now online.

It’s fascinating how it is presenting itself: “this is a revealing of a big mystery that has taken many years to be revealed.” Then, it has that standard of trailers: the fullscreen statement printed out. “No matter what you’ve read, no matter what you believe.”
That sounds to me like the marketing folks are going to try to capitalize on this being a ‘true fictional story’ just like the novel purportedly was.

This film is definitely something to keep an eye on. The novel caused a lot of confusion amongst the historically challenged who read it. Movies have larger audience bases, so the film might bring that whole topic back to the surface. Also, I will not be at all surprised if a lot of well-meaning but misdirected Christian groups call for boycotts of the film.

Thoughts?

The Washington Post reports that Merriam-Webster ran a contest for words that aren’t in the dictionary that should be. M-W was swamped with more than 3,000 entries.

Their top 10 are here.

Anyone who has children (or has been one sometime in the past) will not find this all that amazing.

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to use as many of these in a creative work as you can. Have fun.

Welcome to the new and improved Christian Realists Web site! We’ve been on the Web (and have existed as a community) for nearly seven years now. If you’re one of our long-time readers, then you already know what we’re about and why we exist. If not, check out the ‘about us’ tab over there in the sidebar.

Our new format will allow us to update our site more readily and easily, giving us the chance to interact with more people than ever before. Yes, we believe we’ve got something important to say and so we want to interact with as many people as possible. By making our main page a blog, we’re opening up to our readers the opportunity to interact with us by leaving comments. (This requires registration, but don’t worry, we don’t do anything with the information you provide: the registration is mostly to keep comment spam from occuring.)

But we’re about more than just a polemic. We’re also about living our faith in a genuine manner and that includes the ebb and flow of ideas and the passions of our everyday lives.

Come, join us as we venture out to be Christians, to be real in our art, and to enjoy ourselves and our Lord.