Father Green

I met an invisible friend today. An invisible friend is someone that you know, likely through their writings, but they don't know you. Part of my Master's thesis was based on Father Tom Green S.J. and his work. I found his Weeds among the Wheat to be a practical and wise take on Ignatian discernment that helped guide some of my initial thoughts on vocation. His talks today were on the role of the spiritual director and while there were not earth shattering new insights, it was quite good to meet him and to hear his wisdom in person.

I also met Gordon T. Smith, an evangelical scholar who did his dissertation work on Wesley and Ignatius. Interesting since I'm coming at from a more Reformed (Calvin, Barth) perspective. We had a good but too brief discussion at the end of his second talk.

For more info check out open hearts . . . open minds . Eventually the four talks will be available as MP3's so if vocation and discernment are your things, check them out.

The Paradox of Choice

I thought that getting laid out for days by a fever would have meant that I could have done some reading and blogging but no, the three draft posts are like pot smoking poetry - good only to the writer.

Here is a quick post as I come out of the haze. Finished this book last week and used it below. Lot's of interesting things here. (My friend/colleague J.P. sent me this link if video is more your gig.)

Vocation - Since being convinced by Miroslav Volf that our understanding of vocation is more rooted in the 16th Century than the Bible, and that the largely static society of the Reformation is not a good model for young people thinking about what they should do with their life, I've been on the look out for folks who will support me. Schwartz does indirectly. If the only choice that you have is between marriage and celibacy, your father's profession or the priesthood then you are unlikely to choose the priesthood unless you know a good priest. We don't tend to choose things that we don't know anything about because we are risk averse. It follows then that teens that do not have much 'social capital' and therefore do not know that they have choices will tend to make the same choices as their parent(s). This is not entirely negative given that the other extreme, the 'helicopter parent' who hovers around their kid, offering so many choices that the youth has no idea what to do, can be debilitating. 'Helicopter parents' are maximizers using Schwartz's language and fall into many, many pitfalls when it comes to making choices.

The church, in response to this, should do two things. One, for those youth who do not see choices, present them. Two, for those youth overwhelmed by choice, help in discerning the real choices amidst the masses.

Practicing Discernment with Youth

I need to quibble with Kenda Dean on this one. I'm not sure that White is "the most thoughtful scholar in youth ministry today." He is thoughtful but his innovations in terms of integrating practices of discernment into youth ministry suffer from insufficient grounding in a well reasoned normative theology. There are lots of vague references to the "Holy" (as if you could have holiness without the tension of God's grace and anger), social critique more rooted in Adorno than Amos, and a Jesus who did a lot of nice things. In the end, I struggled to place Whites insights into my context.

White clearly operates from a praxis (in the Marxist sense) methodology when it comes to culture and faith. Culture deadens adolescents with its false promises of happiness through consumption. The church must raise critical conciousness in adolescents. We do that through discernment which is a continual cycle of listening (to our true beings), understanding (to those things which deaden our true being), dreaming (connecting our true beings to Scripture and theology) and finally acting (expressing our true selves).

I can agree with most of this but I was always left with the feeling that I could read someone like Naomi Klein and get this. For instance, isn't discernment both horizontal and vertical? Shouldn't I care both about how social studies can explain something and how God continues to act in the world? Is there no personal God that I must attune myself to in some way? I'm not asking for a simplistic Jesus-is-my-boyfriend theology here. I have more than a passing knowledge of St. Ignatius of Loyola for instance, and he clearly had a concept of God's providential activity in the world. Given that White cites Loyola on more than one occasion, where is an Ignatian sense of discernment which recognizes both feelings and the Spirit?

I will use this book in my own ministry but am sad that its audience is so limited. I teach at an evangelical school and we use many different sources for theological reflection. Sadly, Whites animosity towards evangelicals and/or any traditional orthodoxy will make it difficult for me to assign this book. It isn't that I don't want students to get exposure to other theological traditions. This book however has such a narrow focus that I think that to ask students to persevere through the whole thing would not be worth the time investment. What is even sadder may be that I don't get the sense that White cares about this which is a pity because his thoughtful innovations are worthwhile for more than just his small part of the youth ministry world.