IVP - Strangely Dim - Adventures in Writing Archives

Good News for Short Attention Spans

Pity the poor seminarian, forced to articulate the totality of Christianity in a carefully worded, highly scrutinized document. I occasionally go to a regional meeting for my denomination where candidates for ordination have to stand there while a room full of people read their faith statements and then saunter up to a central microphone to tell them what's wrong with it. The lines of each faith statement are numbered for the convenience of reading and, more important, confronting: "I think it's wonderful that on line seven you speak so movingly of the love of God, but can you help me understand how, on line eight, you contend that this loving God willfully punishes people eternally for something so minor as failing to believe in his Son?" This litany of back-handed compliments and theological posturing is sufferable only because it's so perfunctory; I've yet to attend such a meeting where the doctrinal hazing wasn't followed immediately by unanimous approval of ordination.

The statement of faith is, some might say, an artifact of modernity. They're inheritors of the creedal tradition, when communities of faith would gather and come to consensus about what God had revealed about himself, his creation and his purposes. Such creeds would then be returned to the faith communities, where they would be declared in unison as part of the service. I grew up reciting the Nicene Creed week after week after week, and never once did someone saunter up to a microphone and argue for or against including a comma in line four.

But statements of faith have served as much to distinguish communities of faith as to unite them. They're invitations to an argument, a shot across the bow of other denominations or organizations to confront perceived slippage in the integrity of the Christian faith. They get longer and longer, with more and more numbers for ease of reading and, more important, for ease of shredding. And they're required for seminary graduation, the theological equivalent of requiring someone to stand on a firing range wearing a T-shirt with a bull's-eye on it.

One countertrend to such carefully crafted documents as the statement of faith is Twitter, a forum for communicating random information in 140 characters or less. A few theologians in the Presbymergent community, most notably Adam Walker Cleaveland and Shawn Coons, have taken up the challenge of twittering their faith: stating clearly and concisely how they perceive the heart of Christianity. You can check out the growing pool of entries here.

I like the idea of twittering your faith; it's not only a good challenge to say what you believe in as few words possible, it's a good exercise to do so and then get on with your day, which presumably is an outworking of what you've just twittered. And even beyond that, to declare your faith in a forum that is necessarily ephemeral--each Twitter entry will soon enough be replaced by the next, potentially something as mundane as "stuck in traffic"--is to acknowledge that we are finite and incomplete, that we're still growing in our appreciation of a faith that precedes us by millennia and will extend far beyond us, even to the end of the age.

You Are the Marketing Plan

One of our authors sent me a link to a funny video about book promotion by Dennis Cass:

I watched this video not long after sitting down for coffee with another author about his plans to promote his book and not long before sitting down with someone else to explain why unknown authors struggle so much to get book contracts. I'm reminded what a friend of mine--herself an accomplished author--says repeatedly: "You are the marketing plan."

That, frankly, sounds awful. Imagine, for example, my own current plight: promoting a book on escaping the culture of narcissism and representing myself as an expert on the same. Add to that the common temperament of writers--withdrawn, quiet, bookish, occasionally indolent--and you have a recipe for futility.

It's a tricky business to show your enthusiasm for a book--especially your own book--without becoming obnoxious. I know of at least one person whose efforts at book promotion have earned him a reputation as a pest. In the case of books having to do with Christian virtue or discipleship or worldview, it's even more difficult to avoid seeming or even being condescending, paternalistic, self-congratulatory and a host of other onerous vices of the personality.

I've come to think that most efforts at self-promotion are inherently absurd and, as such, inherently funny. That in itself takes the pressure off. So sin boldly, first-time authors, obscure ethicists and armchair theologians. Spread your unique insights and cleverly themed cultural prescriptions, your own little idea virus, with the brazenness of Typhoid Mary. Enjoy yourself while you do it, and don't forget to occasionally giggle at the silliness of it all, because when it's all said and done we're all on balance saying and doing what we think is best, and hoping that the rest of our universe will fall in line.

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."

Coming Soon: A Fortnight of Cliches

You know what they say . . . nothing ventured, nothing gained.

We're about to embark on a grand collective adventure, to boldly go where no one has gone before. Prepare yourself for Strangely Dim's first Fortnight of Cliches!

You may be thinking, What's a fortnight of cliches? or perhaps even What's a fortnight? I can answer the second question, but the first is, as Momma used to say, a bridge we'll cross when we come to it. A fortnight is fourteen successive evenings, or in layman's terms, two weeks. During the imminent fortnight we'll play fast and loose with cliches of every stripe, perhaps even making up some new ones. We'll have cliches of the day, cliche-based epic poetry, cliche-ridden worship songs. We invite you to play along, submitting your favorite cliches or your various cliche-validating life experiences. We may even figure out how to make an accent over the e in our blogging program.

So ready or not, here the cliches come!