IVP - Strangely Dim

What I Dithcovered in Theattle, Day One

I recently traveled to Seattle for the New Conspirators conference, sponsored by Mustard Seed Associates and inspired by the new Likewise book The New Conspirators by Tom Sine. Here are some of the observations and insights I gained over the course of my first twenty-four hours there.

* A person's anxiety level can be determined by a complex equation involving (a) the size of the vehicle he is driving in comparison to his normal vehicle, and (b) the narrowness of traffic lanes he is driving on in comparison to his normal lane sizes.
* Said anxiety level is increased exponentially by the number of one-way streets along the route to the driver's destination.
* Seattle has a lot of one-way streets.
* Seattle drivers park in ways that make one-way streets look like two-way streets, and vice versa.
* There are places in the world where green, not white, is the color of late February.
* Rock and roll music and science fiction are two great tastes that go great together.
* There are major cities in the United States that have managed to build up and out without paving over every green space and chopping down every tall tree.
* Split pea soup is best enjoyed with gluten-free bread and new friends.
* Thpeaking with a lithp, while juvenile, ith alwayth funny. Ethpecially in Theattle.
* Every man over the age of thirty in Seattle (and perhaps even some of the women), regardless of race, ethnicity, country of origin or habits of exercise and diet, looks almost exactly like IVP Academic senior reference editor Dan Reid.
* I could live here, I think.

A Donkey and a Dream--Or Something Like That

My friend and colleague Jeff Crosby reads the New York Times. I do not. Jeff, therefore, is more hip than I am to all the news that's fit to print, including a recent article about a guy traveling from Portland, Oregon, to Patagonia, South America, with a donkey in tow.

Jonathan Dunham is, apparently, an unassuming guy with virtually no attachments, save the donkey given to him by Mexican farmers. The donkey goes by the name Whothey, which is pronounced "Judas," which sets the mind a-wondering.

People, especially reporters, are among those awondering and have been assigning various motivations to Jonathan--from world peace to a world record and even world evangelization. But what will ultimately be a four-year journey for Jonathan probably most closely resembles the ancient practice of pilgrimage. He has a destination in mind, and he's living simply and quirkily along the way. And while one can only guess at why he's doing what he's doing, he seems to be a likeable guy and has in fact done a little bit for world peace and perhaps even world evangelization along the way. The jury's still out about the world record.

This story appeals to us at Likewise Books for obvious reasons, the most obvious of which is that it features a guy and a donkey, which--if you haven't noticed--is our logo. The lifestyle Jonathan has embraced for himself appeals to us as well, albeit in a more mystical, enigmatic sense: he's living what some of our authors have lived and profiled along the way, from the discipline of pilgrimage practiced by Christian George to the simple and just living articulated by Scott Bessenecker and Kevin Blue, to the embodied spirituality championed by Chris Heuertz, Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (two books in our very near future; keep your eyes out for them), and even the evocative imagery employed in books by Don Everts and Rick Richardson. Jonathan is going and doing, and we here at Likewise can get behind that.

If you think of it, pray for Jonathan and Judas--for safe travels, for warm receptions, for occasional epiphanies. Pray for us if you think of it as well--that we'd publish what needs publishing and that our authors would grow through the experience of helping others grow. And then, if you think of it, pray for yourself--that you'd know when it's time, as Jesus suggests, for you to go and do likewise, and that you'd have the sheer moxie to do it.

Happy Lent?

We are now almost two weeks into the season of Lent, and I have to say, for how widely practiced Lent is, retailers don't seem to take advantage of it much. Normally they miss no chance to throw trifling sale items at us for months in advance of holidays such as Halloween or St. Patrick's Day. I noticed on Valentine's Day, for example, that Easter candy was already on sale. I'm not sure I want to ingest any kind of egg--even a chocolate one--that's over a month old. But until March 23 (and even after, when all the leftovers go on the 75 percent off table), we will be bombarded with egg dyes, bunnies, chicks, chocolate, jelly beans, white-chocolate-peanut-butter-filled crosses, pastel-colored baskets and fake grass. All for a one-day holiday. But for Lent--a season that lasts more than a month--all I can see that the retailers have found to capitalize on is fish sandwiches.

The reasons Lent gets overlooked seem obvious: our culture is all about excess, and Lent is about giving up, going without. And our culture is all about being (or at least appearing--and Christians are, I lament, among the most guilty of this) happy and doing what makes us feel good, and Lent is about mourning. Lent is so contrary to our cultural instincts that not even Kleenex has exploited its sales potential, issuing seasonal tissue boxes that say something like "Blessed are those who mourn" or "A sad face is good for the heart" on them. Or maybe they just haven't thought of it yet.

For someone who didn't grow up observing Lent, I'm a pretty big fan of it. During Lent I'm surprisingly willing to try new disciplines that help me see my sin, name my sin and gain a clearer picture of my own heart. During Lent I think more intentionally about what is distracting me from God. I give myself permission to name disappointments, frustrations, burdens I'm tired of carrying, and give them to God. During Lent I remind others who are struggling that they're not alone, that the season of Lent was born out of struggle and grief and serves as a reminder that, though we mourn and grieve and cry at other times of the year, struggle is a natural "season" that we all go through on this earth. It's part of the church calendar because mourning is important, and because Jesus himself felt and carried the weight of our sin and grief and evil and brokenness so completely, and therefore understands it more than we ever can.

As you continue to tell us how you record laughter, if it's not too much of a juxtaposition, I hope you'll tell us how you mourn, too. In some ways, it seems especially fitting to put laughter and mourning together because that is, essentially, how life on this earth inevitably is put together: deep joy, because God chose to offer redemption to a perfect-world-turned-sinful, is joined with deep mourning, because the perfect-world-turned-sinful is so broken and hurting and evil. Life and death. Hope and grief. Laughter and tears. These juxtapositions are what our days are made of.

So I'll start us off, first with the laughter: I think I record my laughter with exclamatory remarks, exclamation points and possibly capital letters. When that's too much work, though, I do revert to the highly inadequate repetition of the word ha.

And then, on its heels, the things I'm mourning in this season, from reflection on my church's solemn assembly two weeks ago and my own processing and the news of the world around me: rampant sex trafficking and slave labor, shootings that recently killed five women in a local clothing store and seven students at Northern Illinois University, the bitterness in my heart from the things I do out of obligation, the struggles of friends having a hard time seeing God right now. And I mourn them by reflecting on them, not distracting myself from them, by praying for others, by sitting with God in silence.

Laughter is good and necessary (and yes, profoundly distracting). But so is mourning. And the combination of the two, I would argue, is profoundly countercultural: mourning to remind those around us that this isn't how things were meant to be, and laughter to reveal the abundant life and profound hope Christ offers us, even in the midst of the darkness. So--happy Lent, friends. May you laugh and mourn well in this season, and meet Christ richly in both.

You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Comments

Christine A. Scheller posted the following comment on an earlier post about six-word memoirs:

"How does a writer express laughter in words?"

I of course started typing, "Ha ha ha" but stopped myself. This is a much more intriguing question than can be answered in three iterations of the same word.

The biblical Sarah and Abraham recorded their laughter by naming their son Isaac, which translates roughly to "he laughs" or more generally "laughter." That's one way of doing it, I suppose, but then again it creates its own problems.

Something I keep meaning to write about but keep blowing off is a phrase used by biblical patriarch Jacob to describe God: "the Fear of Isaac," which then translates roughly to "the fear of laughter." I like the tension of that phrase--that God somehow brings such disparate experiences as fear and mirth together. Generally, however, I try to avoid tension. I'm uncomfortable associating the word fear with God, and I still get just a wee bit nervous picturing the gathered-together people of God laughing before the Lord of Hosts. So I'm left, I don't know, a little tense trying to imagine two such nerve-wracking emotions coalescing in a coherent description of God. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, and now, thanks to Christine, I don't know how to write what I'm feeling in either case.

So I open it to you, the countless dozens of Strangely Dim readers: How do you record your laughter?

Highly Unusual

This almost never happens: IVP Books is looking for reader input about the cover design for Just Courage, a forthcoming book by Gary Haugen. You can vote for your favorite here.

Gary Haugen is the president of International Justice Mission, a human rights agency that does battle against the sex trade and exposes slave-labor practices throughout the world, out of a Christian conviction about the God-given dignity of human beings. You can learn more about IJM here.

Cover design is normally a pretty cloistered process. The designer works in relative solitude, reading through the manuscript and coming up with a few possible creative concepts for how the book's central ideas might be conveyed visually. The designer has to reconcile several complex factors in the process of designing a cover, including who the anticipated audience is, where they might reasonably be expected to run across the book, and what images, colors and other visual elements will compel the potential reader to look more closely.

The clock is always ticking, of course, and eventually the designer must show her work to a select group of industry professionals--experts in marketing and selling books, for example, and the editor or editors most familiar with the book, the author and the subject. These folks scratch their heads, stroke their chins, squint and stare from far off and close up as they consider how the proposed covers will appear in ads, online and on the bookshelf. Feel free to pity the poor designer; hardly anyone's work is so broadly and carefully scrutinized.

This work almost always takes place behind the scenes because it's so important to the success of a book, and because the capacity for people's preferences and prejudices about fonts, colors, pictures and shapes to subvert their objectivity is frustratingly high. The only controlled environment, the conventional wisdom goes, for objective decision making about cover design is a conference room in a corporate office somewhere, peopled by professionals who are self-correcting and correcting each other when the occasional slide into personal preference starts to show itself.

Why in the world, then, is IVP Books pulling back the curtain on Gary Haugen's new book? The main reason, perhaps, is that we want everyone to read it. The work of the International Justice Mission cuts across demographics and niche markets precisely because it is an international work that serves the cause of justice, and we each are called to be concerned for justice in the world God has placed us in.

That doesn't mean that we don't want everyone to read all our other books, nor does it mean that we think our other books are less important than this one. What it means is simply that since justice is the responsibility of each of us, we're open in this instance to give each of us a voice.

So stop hanging around here; get over to Behind the Books and vote!

The Clock Still Seems to Tick

Today, courtesy of Very Short List, I learned of the book Not Quite What I Was Expecting: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Obscure and Famous. The book collects "ADD autobiographies" submitted to Smith Magazine.

Memoir as a literary form is never uncontroversial; even celebrated Christian memoirist and Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller declared the genre dead--adding wryly that its death means that it still has ten good years left in Christian publishing. Memoir as a genre walks a fine line between stories that transcend the memoirist and edify a broader audience, on the one hand, and stories that act as a release valve for the memoirist's emotional reserves. To say yes as a publisher to the one is to become vulnerable to the other.

I was accosted once at a writers conference by a lovely little old lady who ecstatically recounted a tale of mild woe to me, ending on the happy note of a meagerly miraculous, apparently divine intervention that busted all the dust of her trying experience. I asked her what central idea her story would offer a reading audience, to which she responded, "That God is good." Now, I'm not denying that "God is good" is not a conclusion easily reached by everyone, and a good memoir may reach such a simple conclusion and leave the reader in awe of its profundity. But in the case of the proposal in front of me, the payoff was not worth the story.

With that in mind, I want to thank Smith for giving writers a place to lay their tales of woe to rest, and for enforcing the six-word limit as a writing discipline. As their archives prove, six words can tell a pretty transcendent story.

I'd also invite you, all our Strangely Dim friends, to take a stab at posting your own six-word memoir here. No vulgarities, please. Let me get you started:

"What was I thinking? Now what?"
"I let the dogs out--me."
"Never tell a memoirist your secrets."

Destination Likewise

Strangely Dim isn't just a dumping ground for the random thoughts that occasionally come to Lisa and me; it's also the official blog of Likewise Books, a line of books from InterVarsity Press. And as an official blog, it's our official duty to officially inform you that the Likewise Books website is up and at em.

Soon enough Strangely Dim will actually be relocating to likewisebooks.com, complete with a funky facelift. But you should go to the website now anyway, because it's really cool. There's regularly refreshing content on the home page: a featured interview with a Likewise author, excerpts from Likewise books, a link to this blog and, in perhaps the site's most quirky feature, profiles of people who lived Likewise before they were dead.

You can, of course, also look through our list of books and authors, even peeking into the near future for what's coming next. You can find out where our authors are headed and jump from our site to sites that at least one of us has found interesting at one point or another. It's frightening, really, just how much stuff we've crammed into one little website.

OK. Consider yourselves officially informed. Now, back to the strange and the dim . . .

On Books

Friend and coworker Ellen Hsu tagged me in her family blog last week, so, inspired by her, I'm offering you a look inside some of my reading preferences. As you can see, for some of the questions I had a hard time limiting myself to just one book.

1. One book that changed your life: Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen (published by InterVarsity Press!). I read this after I returned from Cambodia in 2005. It reveals so clearly how deeply God's heart beats for justice, and it did a lot to further my thinking about the roles I can play in fighting injustice. Also Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? by Philip Yancey. I read this at a point when I was wrestling with why we pray. And, while Yancey doesn't offer easy answers or really many answers at all, his words and reflections and questions and honesty deepened both my desire to pray and my faith that prayer is essential and does, in fact, make a difference--more than we often know.

2. One book that you have read more than once: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Is it any wonder why? It's amazing.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, which I haven't actually read yet because I haven't had the quiet and space and uninterrupted time a desert island would afford to process what's in it. And I'd take Fred Van Dyke's teaching notes from the class he taught on the book a few years ago at my church.

4. Two books that made you laugh: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Nobody has characters quite like Dickens. Also, the Mitford books by Jan Karon. I'm currently reading the second book, prompted by others I know who read the books and loved them, and by Lauren Winner's confession that the Mitford books played a role in her conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Maybe you have to have grown up in a small town as a pastor's kid like I did to really appreciate the Mitford books in your twenties, but whatever the reason--I just really like them. The quirky characters (some of whom will remind you of people you know!) and the trueness of small-town life and ministry that Karon has captured make me laugh.

5. One book that made you cry: Well, I don't know if I actually cried, but if I didn't I must have been close: When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him. I read this before my first trip to Cambodia in 2005. It's hard to believe what some people have endured in their lifetime.

6. One book you wish you'd written: Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner. I love her writing style, the way the book is organized, her thought processes and the way she weaves together the different experiences of her life. And one more: The Words Under the Words, a collection of poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye. I'd love to write poetry like what's in this book.

7. Two books you are currently reading: A Light in the Window by Jan Karon (see #4) and Likewise's very own Life After Church by Brian Sanders, in preparation for our Likewise Donkey Congress on February 14. Stay tuned.

8. One book you've been meaning to read: Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. And about fifty others. But that's one that's at the top of the list right now.

Now it's your turn! Lindsay? Keith? Doug and Julie? Post your own answers on your blog, or leave us a comment about books you've read.

Snow Bunnies

Well, it's the first of the month again, which means it's time to play everybody's favorite viral adventure game, "Rabbit"! This month's contest takes place against a backdrop of a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow--twelve inches in some Chicago neighborhoods. Nevertheless, plenty of people soldiered on and played the game to great effect.

Kudos first to Pete, who left his mark at the Rabbit Uber Alles group on Facebook. Feel free to join us there for all things bunnilicious.

Most creative are the Hsus, who started planning their attack last night by digging all the stuffed rabbits out of their toy chests. Al came in early this morning to the InterVarsity Press offices, as is typical for him, and left rabbits on several desks, proving you don't even have to say it to play it.

And then there's Dan, the overachiever, who attacked on multiple fronts--among them a message on Facebook and an e-mail and (most likely) another e-mail to an address I haven't checked yet and phone calls to my cell and my home phone and my office.

I used to be good at this game, but today I'm afraid that I'm only good at drinking coffee and muttering about the weather. But in any event, congratulations to all the winners.

In other news, happy birthday to friends of Likewise Anthony Smith and Matt Conner. Keep the candles on the cake lit, my friends: it's cold outside.