Who doesn’t enjoy snarky retorts that put deserving folks in their places? They are a mainstay of situation comedies, especially when the stories can’t carry the humor.

Snark = snide remark.

Self-Referential Snark

Twitter has little space for narrative. It’s all about simple, direct expression. Including clever criticism.

Lewis Carroll’s fictional “snarks” in his nonsensical poem “The Hunting of the Snark” are ambitious but humorless creatures who can be charmed with soap and smiles. Consider drops of kindness in a sea of snarky tweets. They have the power to encourage and delight without detracting from those who justly deserve a little snark.

Sending messages is not the same as communication. Communication requires shared understanding.

We live in a storm of mediated messages. Most supposed communication is just noise. Like ads that few people pay attention to.

Bruce Springsteen once sung about “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).” Little did he know how many channels there would be in the age of social networking.

We all fire off messages. Is anyone really listening? Is there much real communication? Shared understanding?

The power to transmit messages creates the illusion of true communication.

The rise of the World Wide Web launched an unlikely hero into the media spotlight: Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of movable printing type and technological forefather of Martin Luther’s vernacular Bible. Reporters, Internet columnists and even some scholars began parading Gutenberg before the public as a kind of poster child for the digital revolution. The Net, we were told, would do for modern society what Gutenberg’s invention had done for the Renaissance: spread the fruits of mass education by democratizing communication. Everyone would become a publisher. By late 1997, public discourse about the Net was so deeply anchored in Gutenbergian mythology that skeptics of the digital revolution were sometimes dismissed without a reasonable hearing.

In our understanding of the digital revolution, we have plenty of ideas and little firm grasp. If confusion is democracy, we are rolling in the green.

Like all of us, Gutenberg (1394–1468) inherited a social and technological world created by previous generations. Monks gave their lives to the painstaking process of copying one page of a manuscript after another, until finally another “book” was completed for religious leaders. Reading itself was largely the domain of priests and, to some extent, their wealthy, educated patrons.

When Gutenberg was a young man, someone in Western Europe invented block printing (already used for centuries in China), in which “printers” carved outlines of words or pictures on a block of wood and then inked them for the “press.” The movable-type printing press, for which Gutenberg is so well known, was invented in about 1450, 70 years before the outbreak of the Reformation. In this process, masterminded at least partly by Gutenberg, printers placed reusable, individual letters or characters of type in a form to create a printable page. Hand copying of manuscripts was time-consuming and highly individualized; no two manuscripts were exactly the same. Printing, on the other hand, created a means to make artificial copies that merely imitated the “authentic” reproduction process of the scribes. Printing was considered artless and crude — a kind of cheap imitation or virtual copy of the real thing.

Printers and scribes competed for customers into the second half of the 15th century, when printing finally won the day. Scribes catered to the luxury market by crafting elegant, high-quality manuscripts — much like the difference today between handcrafted and factory-made furniture. But as the prices of printed volumes declined, scribes found themselves without work. At first, scribes sought legal protection for their former monopoly, but they eventually gave in to the inevitable by inserting printed sections into their handwritten works. Some scribes even became consultants, advising printers on how to design their pages to look like calligraphic art.

Early printing was financially risky. The ability to print books did not guarantee a means of marketing them successfully. Printers were driven not by the religious and artistic impulses of the scribes, but by the economic realities of the marketplace. The early years of promise also created the stress of uncertainty — perhaps a feature in the rise of all new media.

The public mythology about Gutenberg locates him in a saintly world of disinterested inventors. The truth is that he was an entrepreneur who took one financial risk after another, using other people’s money, and who maintained a secrecy that was designed to keep any potential competitors from gleaning his ideas. Gutenberg worked so surreptitiously that the best documents we have about his business affairs and technological inventions are from the courts, where he battled unhappy investors who had tired of his many promises and few results.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein shows, the presses eventually “created a new vested interest in ecumenical concord and toleration” — namely, scientific ways of thinking and knowing. As Luther and other evangelicals used the new technology to preach the gospel — or at least their own version of it — they also encouraged printing and reading per se. Christians’ expanded thirst for reading “tapped a vast reservoir of latent scientific talent by eliciting contributions from reckon-masters, instrument-makers and artist-engineers.” As odd as it seems today, this thirst for reading fueled a renewed drive within humankind for a kind of scientific ecumenism, or scientific dogmatism, depending on one’s point of view. Nothing was more important for the rise of scientific communities across geographic space than the printing press. This technology became part of the human quest for a unified approach to mathematics, natural investigation and scholarship in general.

On the one hand, science has grown in stature and cross-cultural impact even through the ages of electronic and now digital media. On the other hand, various religious groups have used the Good Book and their own commentaries and other writings to foster alternative views of truth. In fact, some of the most print-based religious groups are the fundamentalists, who often view the scriptures reverently, much the way that some scientists view their textbooks and professional journals. Somewhere in between, or across, these sides of the print divide, science has created an amazing consensus of thought that permeates even modern religious cultures.

We are all in for serendipitous developments and historical reversals that will show us just how important our political, economic, governmental and religious institutions are in shaping the future. I doubt that technology itself will ever deliver more than the level of responsibility that we bring to our modems, our speakers’ platforms and our online and printed publications. Science and technology change, but human nature is remarkably consistent, confusing, and confounding.

I recently wrote a book primarily for college students, college graduates, and underemployed people on the topic of writing resumes and cover letters: Resume 101: A Student and RecentGrad Guide to Crafting Resumes and Cover Letters that Land Jobs. The book’s accompanying website includes excerpts and an opportunity for people to ask questions about writing resumes and cover letters.

I work closely with current college students and graduates. I see how concerned they are about “looking good” on their resumes. I witness first-hand the difficulty of getting interviews let alone meaningful full-time employment in tough economic times. I empathize with my current and former students to the point of taking on some of their career anxiety. I yearn for them to find work, and to discover that good work, well done, can be deeply satisfying.

Beyond the poor job market, there is another, often-overlooked reason why college students and graduates are so anxious when it comes to writing resumes. They are inheriting a cultural climate that emphasizes image-making over substance. Why else would a student add something to a resume primarily because it will “look good”—even if the entry doesn’t reflect any significant work or life experience on the part of the writer? Students today feel the burden of having to prove their value to a potential employer. They understandably try to manipulate the “data” to project a positive image of themselves.

This is not all bad. Resumes should be an opportunity for the writer to persuade by emphasizing  personal “positives.” I would even hope that college students learn to communicate effectively as part of their formal education. Sure, students should be truthful in what they say in resumes, cover letters, and interviews. But truth can be expressed more or less persuasively. When it comes to resumes, truth is necessary but insufficient. Persuasively expressed truth is essential.

Dr. Q trying to look cool for an interview

The problem today, as I see it, is that students are not as fully truthful as they could be for their own benefit in the marketplace. The “truth” is that current and former college students are experienced persons. Yes, their experience is primarily life experience, not academic or work experience. But a student is a person, and a person is more than a bundle of job-specific skills and academic accomplishments. Students are human beings who have learned primarily by experience, and hopefully by reflection on such life experience. Such learning can and should enhance the persuasiveness of a resume.

As I point out in the book, employers, too, are looking at the whole person, not just at an applicant’s job-specific skills. For instance, they know that the traits of the people we work with are just as important as the immediate professional skills that our colleagues possess. We all enjoy working with people whose experiences have given them a wealth of knowledge of and engaging stories about everyday life. We appreciate colleagues who bring life-acquired, positive virtues to their work—virtues like patience, gratitude, and kindness. We dislike laboring with manipulators and deceivers who care more about themselves and their own careers than anything or anyone else.

The best resume writers—the truly effective resume writers—address what I call the “Big Three”: skills, knowledge, and traits. And they do so not by worrying excessively about “what looks good” on a resume but by aiming to represent their whole selves in all three categories. The result is a resume that is a picture of the personal potential of a possible employee as a human being. This is why even activities such as travel, non-academic cross-cultural experience, hobbies, and volunteering can be so important to include on resumes and cover letters. Such entries round out the skills, knowledge, and traits of the writer.

I jumped into the already-loaded resume-book market because none of the other books take this kind of holistic perspective. There are some fine resume-writing books for a general audience of experienced workers, but not specifically for college students, recent graduates, dropouts, and underemployed persons who typically lack much paid professional experience. Yet most people do have impressive life experience that reflects the kinds of skills, knowledge, and traits that can transferred to all kinds of careers.

To be true to ourselves and others we all need to consider what we have learned from life, not just what we’ve learned on the job. In the end, such self-reflection can lead us toward the sort of examined life the ancient Greeks considered essential. Writing a resume or a cover letter is an opportunity for getting to know ourselves better, and representing ourselves to others more fully. It’s also a recipe for success that is deeper than image.

For more information about the book, please visit the book website.

(Note: This essay is my foreword to a terrific book on media criticism: Robert H. Woods, Jr., and Paul D. Patton, Prophetically Incorrect: A Christian Introduction to Media Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2010).  

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) had a knack for irritating the state church. He claimed an unusual gift: namely, perceiving the lengths of the noses of Christendom’s Pinocchio-like prelates. When their noses grew, Kierkegaard reported it publicly in books and articles. In Kierkegaard’s view, church leaders were self-righteously playing God rather than humbly following God. As he once put it, “Christendom plays the game of taking God by the nose: God is love, meaning that he loves me—Amen!”1 By “Christendom,” Kierkegaard meant the established, bureaucratic, self-serving institution that had become increasingly irrelevant to the real spiritual vitality of everyday citizens. Christendom was a godless church, more like a country club than a place for submit- ting to the one true God. “Christendom,” wrote Kierkegaard, “is a society of people who call themselves Christians because they occupy themselves obtaining information about those who a long time ago submitted themselves to Christ’s examination—spiritlessly forgetting that they themselves are up for for examination.”

Beginning with the story of Adam and Even in the book of Genesis, the biblical drama shows that human beings have always been liars. We like to fib. To exaggerate. To misrepresent. To pretend that we know more than we really do. For instance, self-serving deception is a common malady in the modern advertising business. Deceit runs throughout contemporary political discourse of the Right and Left. Like politicos, we appreciate opportunities to enhance our own ethos so that others will look at us more kindly or respectfully—even if all we get is fifteen minutes of media fame. In short, we humans dwell east of Eden, in ever-evolving but rarely progressing cultures that are based on one or another pack of lies about God, ourselves, others, and the creation. As Augustine discovered, our collective, self-serving, socially shaped lies foul up our personal desires. We desire the wrong things—or the right things in the wrong ways. We love things the way we should love only God, and we pretend to love God while treating God as another thing to control. We become tragic characters in our own puny, picayune dramas. Which came first—real life or reality TV? What difference does it make to us? After a while, we can hardly distinguish between our adventures and our misadventures. We imitate the oddities that we have created in the media. Imagine Adam and Eve watching their fall unfolding on TV and enjoying the drama. This would have been the first reality TV series (as long as God was not there to narrate).

Into this mess steps a prophet, himself or herself fallen but simultaneously carrying a God-given ounce of dangerous, culture- upsetting, society-challenging wisdom. This prophet’s wisdom runs deeper than data or information. The wisdom could be only one word: Stop! Outlandish! Unjust! Folly! The Decalogue itself is essentially ten word-phrases that might please a modern Ger- man linguist. Here’s a slippery translation of one command: “No- idols-or-you’re-dead-meat.” I can imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger mouthing this line in a movie. The problem is that the word idol would not work. It is not commercial enough for prime time. Especially in a literal translation: “No-nothings-or-you’re-dead- meat.” An idol is, literally speaking, a nothing. The insightful prophet perceives the connection between no-nothings and the know-nothings who worship them. Didn’t Jesus say something like “I’ll be Bach”? A reporter could answer that question properly without parroting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line in the movie The Terminator, “I’ll be back.”

The Hebrew and Christian traditions offer a prophetic means for human beings to find their way amid the miasma of mediated mendacity. This way requires humans to do something outrageous, even foolish by many of today’s standards: to be faithful (or to be true to the One who is the truth). This kind of faithfulness is based on assumptions at odds with Christendom. First, we truthseekers assume that there is a living, personal God of the universe. There is a God who knows, who sees through the lies that we hold dear. Second, we assume that God has and will continue to speak to us through wise, God-fearing mediators. Third, we give witness to particular people and other means by which God speaks the truth in our midst; instead of merely listening to God as individuals, we listen as communities of prophetic discourse in which we can hold each other accountable. We affirm prophetic critics’ gifts to identify and speak the truth, but we also question them as to whether they are speaking truthfully. We might not like everything they say. We will not always appreciate words of wisdom that hit too close to home, challenging our misplaced desires and reminding us that we cannot control our own fate. The prophetic way is inherently communal, testing the words of truth through ongoing proclamation, discussion, and sacrificial living.

Obviously I have ducked several of the most difficult questions related to the specific times, places, and means that God uses to speak prophetically (or, to put it less tribally, the ways that God appropriates human beings’ language for God’s own purposes). When Augustine claims that “all truth is God’s truth,” he reminds us that there is always gold as well as dross in any culture; truthtelling cannot be limited to any one social group. Does God “speak” through an individual person’s conscience? Do some people hear the literal voice of God? Neither my foreword nor this book claims to solve these problems. Indeed, such difficulties are probably necessary for faith. To borrow another quote from Kierkegaard, “Christianity has been abolished somewhat as follows: life is made easier.”3

My own view is that God can appropriate anything for the purpose of speaking to humans. Here I am borrowing from Nicholas Wolterstorff’s fine book Divine Discourse, which uses speech act theory to support the thesis that God speaks. 4 As Wolterstorff argues, God does not just reveal truth or inspire people to speak the truth. God asserts things, commands things, promises things, and so forth. God accomplishes such speech acts, first, through prophets who proclaim the source of their speech: “Thus says the Lord.” Prophets are deputized to speak in the name of God—just as an ambassador might (or should!) speak in the name of the head of state that he or she serves.

This essay is the foreword to this book.

Moreover, God speaks not just through such deputized prophets but, second, by appropriating others’ truthful messages. These truthtellers need not be prophets in the sense of being directly called by God to declare the Lord’s word. For example, God appropriates King David’s speech in the psalms. David never says, “Thus says the Lord,” as if he were a prophet who heard the words directly from God. Nor was he merely inspired by God to write psalms. Nor was he simply revealing more about God by writing the psalms. God appropriated David’s language in order to speak the truth. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures certainly include both prophets and apostles deputized by God to speak in the name of God, but the same Scriptures include other human discourse, like the psalms and epistles, which God appropriated in order to say what God wanted to say.

Now Robert H. Woods and Paul D. Patton are playing the role of deputized prophets by appropriating others’ words—words spoken by God, rabbis, scholars, and cultural critics, among others—for the sake of truthtelling about the purpose and nature of prophetic media criticism. Their purpose is to speak truthfully about the state of contemporary media criticism by offering a renewed vision of the critic as prophet. Their own guides include the insightful Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72), who descended from European rabbis and whose family was decimated by the Nazis. He escaped Poland before the Nazis could send him to the death camps, but the emotional scars remained: “If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”5 In effect, Heschel and the other sources of wisdom in this book are Kierkegaardian gadflies in the midst of today’s Christendom. While monitoring their own noses, they are busily yanking the planks out of each other’s eyes and using the wood to build a bridge between the prophets of old and the media critics of today. Moreover, they are building a bridge over which we too can journey back and forth, appropriating words that help them and us to understand our plight in societies dominated by consumerism. Heschel’s daughter recalls of her father, “Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s own tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil— into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child, and they must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”6

One problem (or is it an opportunity?) that Professors Woods and Patton necessarily face is avoiding the existing shibboleths that religious and nonreligious groups simplistically equate with God’s truth. The language of “prophecy,” “the prophetic,” and “prophetic voice” have been co-opted by disparate groups acting like psychological, theological, and ideological thought police. This is particularly true for media criticism, which is highly predict- able given the theo-moral background of the critics. For instance, mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic media criticism has been co-opted by what we might call “secular elite culture.” Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the words of the Times (almost any Times) or National Public Radio, on the one hand, and the words of the mainline critics on the other. Meanwhile, much evangelical media criticism has been co-opted by “inspirational” popular culture. There is a fine line between evangelical media criticism and evangelical celebrity culture; the celebs are the de-facto, trusted critics. Why? Partly because their predictable, tribe-affirming criticism sells well. Who can argue with the marketplace, the great adjudicator of Christian truth? If you want to operate a successful “ministry,” you have to find a leader whose words confirm what the tribe wants to believe is true. Christendom, both on the Right and the Left, increasingly resembles gaggles of gawkers with their own penchants for self-styled, self-induced “Christian correctness.” Like all fallen human beings, Christians tend to seek media content that confirms what they already believe or wish to believe. This is far more than what psychologists call selective perception; it is a form of self-delusion.

This book’s splendid title, Prophetically Incorrect, captures the authors’ shibboleth-questioning perspective. The playful title captures a kind of extra-tribal or cross-tribal vision that refuses to bow down to the commonplaces de jour. TV celeb Bill Maher claims to be “politically incorrect” but is far more politically predictable. When his program was on Comedy Central, it was less predictable (and less profitable) than it became on ABC. He serves on the board of a humble organization called The Reason Project (religiously dedicated to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society). Maher once referred to religion as a “neurological disorder”—similar to the phrase “psychological disorder” that conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage, on the other end of the thought police divide, uses to describe liberalism. Fans of Maher or Savage love to see evil people’s oxen get gored. Again, we all do, as long as we are not among the evil people.

A second problem the authors face is the self-deceptive nature of propaganda in mass-mediated societies. Most citizens, whether they are religious or not, naively assume that propaganda is simply the easily identifiable lies and deceptions promulgated by a few really bad people (like a Hitler). This simplistic, good-bad notion of propaganda is actually part of the propaganda by which we all live. Augustine in the fourth century battled against Manichaeism, which held a dualistic worldview in which the flesh was evil and the spirit was good—period. Today the villains are said to be members of one or another social group: fundamentalists, liberals, feminazis, neocons, and so forth. The specific labels come and go as new dualisms emerge from media discourse. This self- deceiving criticism lacks prophetic discernment. Like toddlers, we stuff square or triangle blocks into their respective holes on the top of a plastic can—round is good and goes here, whereas square is bad and goes here. We self-servingly employ favorite moralistic categories to simplify the complex, confusing, and often incongruous aspects of culture.

Along the way, we completely miss some deeply biblical categories. For instance, some critics’ concerns about immoral media content focuses on obscenity and profanity but ignores racism and sexism. Others focus on materialism but ignore gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity. In short, we critics tend to carve up the world into classifications that reflect our desire for self-righteousness more than they do our faithful quest to become selflessly wise. We propagandize ourselves. The media join in, telling us what we already believe or what we want to believe—regardless of whether or not such belief is ultimately true. The media do not cause us to believe one thing or another; that idea is itself too simplistic, more like scapegoating than critical analysis. Media and culture are synergistically dependent on one another; both the media and our lives are complicated mixes of good and bad motives and misordered desires, many of them institutionalized in bestseller lists, fan and critic awards, audience ratings, and YouTube rankings.

Prophetic wisdom invariably prods people to ask themselves what it is that they truly want—and why. Often it uses satire and parody, frequently in the form of questions. God begins the fun with a whopper directed at the newly fallen couple in the garden of Eden: “Where are you?” The question was ontological and ethical rather than merely geographical. When I was growing up in Chicago we used to ask one another, “What’s shakin’? What’s going on? What’s happening?” Most of the time our friendly greetings were not meant to be interrogations. But when we knew that some- thing significant was happening, we were quick to follow up with more questions. “Was Jim suspended from school for drinking in PE again?” We did not want him to get booted out. But we did desire to drink in PE without getting caught. Surely we needed a higher vision based on a deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of life. We did not respect school officials, some of whom might not have completely deserved such respect. But who merited our respect? How should we have fulfilled our mimetic desires? In a spoof interview in the Christian humor magazine The Wittenburg Door, Superman complains, “I used to be this untouchable, all-powerful being. I always did the right thing. I never struggled with the decision. Now people want someone more down to earth, easier to relate to. So I have this relationship with Lois I can’t figure out. And I make little moral misjudgments, like sleeping with Lois, leaving my elderly mother alone for five years while I go search for Krypton, things like that. I’m just an ordinary guy with the powers of a god. That’s what people want from Jesus nowadays, too. Not an all- powerful, all-knowing, all righteous God. They want an affable, easy-going guy who just happens to have superpowers and uses them for good. “7

We could have used those superpowers to get off the hook in high school. Imagine the opportunities!

There is something delightful about self-deprecating prophetic wisdom when it reveals our foibles with gentle love and open curiosity about our plight in this good but fallen world. As the authors of this volume indicate, prophets sometimes have to call down the roof, overturn the tables, and “call ’em as they see ’em.” Still, the more subtle, inquisitive style of prophetic critique has its place. For one thing, we are curious creatures—even curious about what troubles us and why we continue on our wayward paths individually and collectively.

Perhaps partly because of what Augustine called original sin, we are born with what J. Richard Middleton calls a “desire to learn, a passion to explore, to stretch the boundaries of the known, to go new places, to discover new insights, to ask probing questions that maybe we hadn’t asked before.” According to Middleton, this curiosity is a “natural part of life. It’s a developmental task God has put before us, and it’s a blessing God has gifted us with—to be playful as kittens in our curiosity.”8 We need to learn measured styles of prophetic criticism that bring others into the conversation rather than drive them away from the discourse. This partly means not taking ourselves so seriously that we fail to take others seriously enough. Perhaps the underlying basis for all prophetic criticism must be humble gratitude. Gratitude to God, first, and to other faithful critics, second, melts away our self-righteousness. The fact is that we cannot save ourselves even by knowing the prophetic truth; salvation is beyond our rhetorical, ethical, and hermeneutical abilities. The kingdom of God and all of its prophetic insights are gifts worthy of accepting before we get overly exercised about anything that appears to be wrong with media and culture. “Everything changes,” writes Evan Drake Howard, “when we realize that the only rewards that matter can’t be earned. This is how prophets and righteous persons and children live—not out of shoulds but out of thanks.”9 Much Jewish humor—from Seinfeld to Stiller—simultaneously pokes fun at human beings’ nuttiness while gently reminding audiences that things could be worse. We ought to be thankful for the fact that our situation is not even more desperate, that we can still smile and laugh rather than merely hate. Speaking at the Oslo Conference on “The Anatomy of Hate” in 1990, the former Czech Republic President Václav Havel said, “The man who hates does not smile, he merely smirks; he is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule; he can’t be genuinely ironic because he can’t be ironic about himself. Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically.”10 Kenneth R. Chase insightfully says that Christian discourse “emerges out of a double humility: the humility that comes from acknowledging the inexhaustibility of God’s abundant grace, and the humility that arrives from a posture of silence before the Almighty.”11

In Brian Friel’s play Translations, Irish bureaucrats are remap- ping the country and changing the long-standing place names that carried the histories of the local people and their common experiences of the land and its related cultures. The bureaucrats’ outlandish aim is to create for the entire country a simple, understandable, six-inch map largely devoid of any of the cultural memory of specific places. In the name of progress, they are destroying what one character calls “a rich language . . . full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception— a syntax opulent with tomorrows.”12 Just as playwright Friel serves as a kind of prophet, revealing culture-robbing folly and warning about its implications, the contemporary media critic can help us to identify what we lose and gain in the mediatization of practically every aspect of modern life. Without such audacious critics, we can become “imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . . fact.”13 The perennial task of the prophet is understanding the contours of the present in the light of God’s wisdom. The critic thereby mediates our understanding of the media world by proclaiming and warning, satirizing and tracking the ongoing remapping of God’s world. The Christian critic always does so self-reflexively as part of a community of Christian discourse, aware that he or she might indeed be part of the problem. As Kierkegaard wrote, “There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.”14 May this book help all of us to attend to the sizes of our own noses as we monitor the noses in the media.

1 Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, ed. Charles, E. Moore (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1999), 227.

2  Kierkegaard, 226.

3  Kierkegaard, 227.

4 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

5 Susannah Heschel, “Abraham Joshua Heschel,” accessed at <http://home.versatel.nl/heschel/Susannah.htm> on January 23, 2009.

6 Ibid.

7 Matthew Mikalatos,. “’Interview’: Superman.” The Wittenburg Door 37, no. 211(May/June 2007): 36-37.

8 J. Richard Middleton, “Curiosity Killed the Cat (Or, the Outrageous Hope of Reformational Scholarship and Practice).” Perspectives 32, no. 4 (December 1998): i-iv.

9 Evan Drake Howard, “Reflections on the Lexionary.” Christian Century, June 17, 2008, 21.

10 Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings, 1990-1996 (New York: Fromm International, 1998), 57.

11 Kenneth R. Chase, “Christian Discourse in a Nietzschean Age: Mapping a Theological Location for Persuasion,” Paper presented at the Religious Communication Association annual convention, New York, NY, November 12, 1998.

12 Brian Friel, Translations: A Play (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1981), 50.

13 Friel, 51.

14 Kierkegaard, 227.

When I began studying communication in college I discovered various theories about the origins of human beings’ communicative capacity. I was intrigued — and still am.

We don’t know precisely how human language “evolved,” but we can discuss one interesting thought: Communication is a gift.

You and I did not create our communicative abilities. We did not fabricate the capacity for gesturing or speaking, lying or truthtelling, remaining silent or speaking up on behalf of others. The ability to communicate was forged before we came along, even before historical records. Communication is a gift that we have received and that we surely ought to pass along for the benefit of future generations.

A somewhat mysterious gift? Yes. At least I think so. I’m astonished that the ancient Hebrews described God as a speech agent, not just a thinker, listener, or creator. Perhaps there is something extra-biological in humans’ capacity to converse deeply, morally, and faithfully about nearly anything. Maybe even something extra-natural, supernatural. Consider prayer, one of the most widely practiced forms of human communion with God on behalf of others.

The twentieth-century rhetorical critic and theorist Kenneth Burke wrote about human beings’ symbol-using (and misusing) abilities. According to Burke, humans invented “the negative” (the capacity for moralizing, for saying “no” as well as “yes”) and created their own, unnatural communications “instruments” (or media). In today’s world, this is a compelling way to look at the origin of language as a purely human concoction. But as Burke adds, humans’ symbol-using and symbol-misusing ability, when viewed from such a purely humanly creative standpoint, results in a strange conclusion; humans are “rotten with perfection.” If we are a bit god-like (perfect) in our speech, we are also a bit devilish (rotten). We are simultaneously devils and angels.

While the research about the origins of language continues, we can still accept the gift, no matter how perfect or rotten the gift seems to make us at times. Generally speaking, gifts engender gratefulness even when they are not exactly what we wanted. We tend to be thankful enough to accept a gift because of the generosity of the giver. We don’t just study the gift. We don’t question the motive of the giver — at least not usually. Instead we celebrate the gift and, if appropriate, use it well in order to reciprocate by honoring the giver.

So I offer thanks to my parents for teaching me the value of language. To the teachers who helped me learn how to speak and write well. To friends who guided me as an adult to use the gift as wisely as possible. Indeed, I offer thanks to all of those who contributed along the line, through the centuries and even millennia, to the forms of speaking and gesturing that equip us to know and love each other, near and far. May we all have enough grace to avoid rotten communication while never pretending perfection. Finally, and most mysteriously, thanks to the extra-biological instigator beyond and before the apes.

Each time I listen, speak, read, or write, I assume that something positive could occur. I assume that I will be able to understand and to be understood. I believe that my utterances, like those of others, are worth the time and effort.

Why?

This is one of the great questions about human communication: Why do we believe that our communication can make a positive difference?

One answer is that our life experiences teach us that communication is worth the investment. We can recall when our communication mattered: when we successfully conveyed to a restaurant server what we wanted for dinner, and we thereafter enjoyed the meal; when we asked someone for help and they reached out to us; when a family member humbly requested forgiveness and we gratefully accepted their wishes; when someone taught us and we learned; when we told a story that our friends enjoyed.

Of course we all recall situations where our communication failed. When I grade student exams I realize that I have not always instructed well. Sometimes I assume that the students are at fault. That questionable assumption partly protects my ego until the next round of exams.

But whether I blame myself or others I still strive to communicate well. I continue trying even when circumstances seem to make communication impossible. I communicate faithfully, expecting to serve others and to be served by them.

For instance, my mother and I had a turbulent relationship. Partly because of her lifelong illnesses and partly because of my immaturity, our communication was stressful. Too often we ignored one another. Worse yet, we sometimes exchanged unkind comments, verbal jabs at the heart.

One day I was driving home from campus and thinking about whether or not I should stop to visit her. I felt obligated to do so. After all, I was her son, related by blood. She had given me life. How could I not commune regularly with her even if it was sometimes painful? While contemplating my mixed feelings about visiting my own mother, a strange thought seduced me. I felt called to ask her about her upbringing during the Great Depression.

Still driving along University Boulevard, I wondered where that thought had come from. To the best of my knowledge, I had not been reading, writing, or conversing about the Depression. Maybe the thought came to me because my mother suffered from depression; maybe I swapped one meaning for the other one. To this day, I don’t know the origin of that thought. In any case, the thought called me. I had to answer it.

Here’s what happened.

I stopped to visit my mother. I asked her about growing up in the Great Depression. Then I listened. She spoke emotionally for a long while. I paid attention, taking in her response. She told me amazing stories of family difficulties. In fact, I learned for the first time that one of my aunts was actually adopted because her own parents could not care for her during that trying time. As a result, my mother lost parental attention. And she grew desperately jealous. As I listened, I discovered that my mother was a hurt human being who needed to be heard, understood, and appreciated. For the first time in my life, I empathized with her beyond our blood relationship, beyond my obligation to respect her. For the first time in my memory, I had compassion for my own mother. I realized how her past, largely beyond her control, had affected her. My mother’s recollections touched my heart.

These kinds of heart-to-heart breakthroughs give us special faith to continue communicating. They point to better relationships that are more trusting, empathetic, and ultimately satisfying. From that day forward I was able to love my mother in ways that I never thought were possible for me. Our relationship was never easy, but it became ever more peaceful.

Years later I received a call from my brother who lived several thousand miles away. At that time our mother lived near him. Mom was dying, he said. He had taken her to the emergency room where doctors discovered that she was severely ill. Cancer. Very advanced cancer. Stunned, I booked a flight and began preparing emotionally to spend her final days with her. Sitting in the plane, jammed in a seat with little physical room, I exercised my mind and my heart. I contemplated that day when I had journeyed unexpectedly down University Boulevard toward her memories of the Depression. I wondered what else I could or should say to the dying woman who had birthed me. Time goes frightfully fast and painstakingly slow when traveling by memory toward an impending ending.

It took me the rest of the day to catch several buses over 150 miles from the big-city airport to the rural hospital. When I arrived, my brother and I hugged. I then leaned over my comatose mother, took her hand in mine, and said close to her ear, “Mom, it’s Quin.” She suddenly opened her eyes widely, looked directly at me, mumbled, and fell back asleep. It was the last time that she opened her eyes or spoke. She died that night.

I wonder what she said. But I also wonder if I really needed to know. I had already heard her heart speak to me on that day when I had asked her about the Depression. By faith, I had then reached out to her. I had listened, heart to heart. I humbled myself so that I could empathize with my own mother. That act of faith — a gift and a calling — gave me reason enough to go forward after her death, word by word. Faithfully.

Why did the monastics sometimes take vows of silence.   Is silence better than speech?  Is there anything fundamentally wrong with speech?

It’s probably true that if we are busily talking we might be less inclined to listen to others. To observe them. To pay attention to them. Monologue does not guarantee intimacy. (Does dialogue? That’s a topic for another essay.)

If we don’t listen to others we can’t get to know them as distinct persons with their own hopes and fears. We can’t love them because we fail to truly know them and how to serve them. Mutual listening is a kind of communicative foreplay for relationship.

The ear is just as important for intimacy as are the eye and the hand. By listening to others we can learn to caress them in our minds and hearts. To inch toward being one with them.

Perhaps human silence is not really empty. Maybe silence speaks in a special, sometimes mysterious language of the heart. We can then hear the birds. The wind. Our own thoughts. Who we really are. Whose we are.

Could it be that we fear silence because we fear ourselves — what we might think or feel or desire? Oh, lonely solitude! What is beyond your void? What ghost of ages past speaks through your discomforting resonance?

What if our silence is actually an opportunity to listen? What if silence is always important because someone has already spoken, long or shortly before we open our mouths and move our lips? What if the creator of the universe “speaks” through the creation? Could we even identify let alone understand that “speech” if we are noisy rather than silent? What does it mean to “listen up”? Why are we content to “listen here”?

Strange possibility: We in high-tech societies are becoming media-rich and relationship-poor. We are noise-oppressed. Silence-deprived. Love-challenged. Spiritually shallow beings in a darkening sea with rising miasma. Do the words “I love you” mean much today?

Maybe we can learn from the monastics how to regain the love in silence, to speak only if we can improve upon the silence. Maybe such silence can equip us for tasting heaven on earth, with open hearts to hear beyond our own words.

“Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,/ Take me to You, imprison me, for I/ Except You enthral me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.” –John Donne, Sonnet 14

To improve upon our self-induced silence, shall we first listen up?

Augustine of Hippo believed that human beings were originally created as perfect communicators, living in complete unity with each other and God. I’m not so sure he was correct.

How could we creatures commune perfectly with other persons, let alone God? We’re finite creatures. Even if we could communicate perfectly with each other surely we couldn’t commune with many people at once. We’re limited by the quantity as well as the quality of messages. Email today proves the point— lots of messaging but lots of confusion and ignorance, too.

Although we can imagine perfect communication in concept, we can’t imagine it in specific actuality. We get to taste a bit of intimate communication here and there, but the full banquet is beyond us. We’re physical, embodied creatures.  If we want to enjoy food most fully, we have to savor less than what we might desire. Similarly, we have to practice self-restraint in order to experience fuller communion.

We humans imagine communication only in terms of evaporating time, not in terms of the possibility of timelessness. We all wish we had more time to communicate what really matters in life, with people who really matter to us. We even hope to find more time so that we can matter more to others. Yet we seem to be limited by the daily avalanche of messages that demand our attention. We don’t have the time to imagine what our communication could be like outside of the limits of time!  Some of our most pleasurable intimacy with others — when we really connect — seems timeless at the time. But how could we  implement that timeless vision in our time-bound lives?

So here’s an irony: We humans are able to send and receive messages faster then ever, almost instantaneously from place to place, around the globe, and increasingly through space. Yet at the same time (in the same high-tech era, too) we don’t have enough time to discern how to use the speed more meaningfully. Meaning evaporates just as quickly as we can shower ourselves with messages. Time both equips us to communicate meaningfully and limits the intimacy of our communication.

Did Augustine contemplate this irony when his scribes furiously wrote his sermons, letters, and books for others to read? I can’t believe that he imagined five million-plus of his words still “in print” 1600 years later, communicating across geographic space and through the generations. His words, however much they are misunderstood today, still resonate with readers. By reading his Confessions (the first Western autobiography) we can transport ourselves to northern Africa, around the year 400 A.D. Perfect communication with Augustine? No. But pretty amazing nonetheless. Augustine’s body is gone but his ruminations endure.

How is that really possible? What does it say about our creaturely natures? I don’t know.  It’s time for me to go.

By Quentin J. Schultze

Among the popular words of our day is “diversity.” Writer and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, who refuses to own a computer, says that diversity is capacity. I experience that truth every time I write a book, plan a conference, or teach a class with others. We all can stretch our minds and deepen our hearts through the contrasting perspectives that we discover intentionally or accidentally.

But what should diversity include? What kinds of “differences” among people and cultures merit our study, understanding, appreciation, and perhaps even adoption?

Imagine diversity in terms of communication, especially the range of people we might interact with during the week. Most of us spend most of our time communicating with those who are like us. For instance, we feel more comfortable communing with people who share our social class, values, and beliefs. We prefer interacting with people who look like us, or at least dress like us.

My college students think of themselves as individuals, but by and large they dress alike. And speak alike. So do the faculty. I always chuckle when someone brings a toddler to campus. Students stand around watching and smiling as if they have never seen a child before. Suddenly their campus conformity is delightfully challenged.

By limiting our discourse with different others, we lack what I call “communicative diversity.”

For instance, Christian worship services tend to be among the least diverse social gatherings if diversity is defined in terms of categories like race and ethnicity. Moreover, Christians segregate by doctrine as well as worship style. Understandably, few church communities see doctrinal diversity in a positive light. The easiest way to avoid being challenged about doctrine is gather together people committed to the same beliefs.

These sorts of religious exclusivism do suggest a lack of diversity. But they also indicate unity. Church historian Martin Marty once said about denominations, “We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them.” Somehow we need unity as well as diversity in order to function as social beings. If our differences are too great, communication is virtually impossible. If we are too unified, we risk becoming complacent or tribalistic, even uncreative.

Most social groups that become too homogeneous naturally split apart as people seek fresh distinctions and new opportunities to grow, learn, and delight. When churches grow numerically, they frequently beget other congregations. Denominations divide. Occasionally they reunite. They accomplish all of this unity and diversity via the gift of communication, which equips them to define what they have in common and what they no longer want to have in common, who they are and who they are not collectively.

So unity and diversity are two sides of social life, the yin and the yang of schisms and reunifications. All groups, apparently because of human nature, go through such changes in their lives as they interact with others. In fact, the struggles over unity and diversity are part of what unifies all people. They are humanly universal aspects of living.

In the digital age, however, diversity is becoming more significant than unity to many people. We rarely hear public discourse about the need for unity. The media are abuzz instead with rhetoric about the need for diversity, such as multiculturalism.

Moreover, it seems that today we tend to view diversity almost “exclusively” in terms of existing differences among individuals and especially groups. We look across geography, from place to place, nation to nation, North and South, for diversity that might enhance out capacity. Rightly so.

Nevertheless, this view of diversity itself lacks diversity. Maybe a fuller, more robust view of diversity should include differences through time, from generation to generation, age to age. In the 1970s the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote a book (Culture and Commitment) about the so-called “generation gap,” arguing that whereas youth used to learn from the elders of their communities the tables were turning: Youth were beginning to teach elders about life (At least we know this is true about many technologies today!). Mead was rather optimistic about this diversity, wherein communication would flow influentially from younger to older persons, not just the traditional direction. But how diversifying is that kind of communication if youth’s life experiences (their own diversity) are fairly limited? Caught up in the anti-establishment attitudes of the time, Mead never really addressed that issue.

Another way of viewing diversity is chronologically from century to century. In other words, we might generate human capacity if we commune with “different” people from past generations. This is what the word “tradition” has tended to mean in English, apart from more recent connotations that equate it with old-fashioned, antiquated, and even rigid cultures. From the Latin, the word suggests something of value that is passed along from generation to generation, people to people. The wise Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton picked up on this kind of age-old diversity when he wrote that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Tradition can give the dead a voice in our current discourse. Traditional practices and beliefs can expand our discourse.

Perhaps this age of information should lead us to commune with the voices of the past available to us in the records that they have left behind. Age-old texts offer this type of communicative diversity. When I read Plato or Pascal, for instance, I get a sense (always imperfectly, partly because it’s not easy to commune with the dead!) of what they valued, how they thought, what they believed. I also grasp, however imperfectly, the groups, movements and controversies of their day. Their communication with others in their day becomes a means for me to become more diverse in my day. I might accept or reject their ideas, often after critical discourse with my living friends and colleagues. But I do find nuggets of value in their words from long ago. I am often impressed. Even a bit jealous (no, very covetous) of their minds.

When St. Augustine says that a believer in God should be an “alleluia from head to toe,” I want to contemplate his ancient wisdom. I seek to ponder anew, in the midst of today’s busy and frightening world, what it might be like to be a person of walking, talking, working, playing gratitude. I wonder why I grumble as much as I do. Why I sweat the little things and overlook the cosmic picture of peace and beauty.

Then, with the help of my college librarians who are more linguistically gifted (diverse!) than I am, I discover that Augustine was really paraphrasing one of the ancient Hebrew psalms. He learned from others who were long gone. Suddenly I realize that I am the beneficiary of not only Augustine’s diversity, but the ancient psalmist’s, too. Maybe even King David himself. Of course Augustine was African. What a long, strange road to my own diversity training!

Today I can search many of Augustine’s and David’s writings online. If I have the time. And the commitment to diversity beyond the here and now. Perhaps this is a major calling for those of us committed to communicative diversity.