The Review Revolution: Improving Culture through Kvetching

Paul Hamm's Loss is Raj Bhavsar's Gain

Occasionally, there is gross injustice in the world of The Judged Sport.  As a diehard fan of gymnastics and figure skating for more than two decades, I feel like I've seen some pretty incomprehensible judging decisions through the years, including the pairs tie in Salt Lake City in 2002, Mary Lou Retton's 10.0 on vault in 1984 (sorry, jingoistic America, but that was not a stick; watch it from the side), and most recently, the exclusion of Raj Bhavsar from the USA men's gymnastics team for Beijing.

At the 2008 Olympic Trials, Bhavsar was spot-on with no misses in all 12 routines over both nights. He almost clinched one of the top two spots, which would have guaranteed him an automatic berth on the team.  No one could have imagined that such a strong third-place finisher would wind up as the second alternate, but that is exactly what happened when the selection committee announced its other four team members.  The idea behind the new selection criteria is to try to round out the strengths of the two automatic team members, who were Paul Hamm and Jonathan Horton.  Both of those athletes are consummate all-arounders, so the thinking was that the team didn't need all-around gymnasts so much as specialists like Kevin Tan (who is admittedly a god on the rings, but doesn't contribute much elsewhere).  I can see the strategy, but it was unbelievably harsh to Bhavsar, who was in this exact position in 2004: he had the meet of his life at the Olympic Trials and was still left at home as the alternate.

Well, never say never in sports.  Paul Hamm announced today that he's had a setback in his recovery from breaking his hand in May.  (And you know what's crazy?  Within minutes someone had updated his Wikipedia page with all the new info.  These are crazy days we live in, people.)  I am devastated for Paul Hamm, and of course this seriously impairs the USA men's chance of winning a medal in Beijing, but . . . I am absolutely thrilled for Raj Bhavsar.

Raj, your never-quit attitude has finally paid off.  Go get 'em in China. I'll be cheering for you.

Zotero is freakin' awesome!

I've only been out of grad school eight years, but it's astonishing how technology has changed everything about research just in that time.  It's a whole new geeky world out there, baby. 

I am trying to write an encyclopedia article on Religion and Literature in American history.  In case you didn't hear the note of panic in my e-voice, that's all of religion, and all of literature, and all of American history.  Due date: August 15.  Are we having fun yet?

Enter Zotero, a.k.a. The Little Research Engine That Could.  This tool is amazing!  Basically, the idea behind Zotero is that scholars like me who have infinite numbers of yellow post-its stuck in their books but can't quite locate the one they need when they need it can have everything at their fingertips online.  Zotero catalogs all of your research by capturing web pages, bibliographic info, random notes, html tags, whatever, all in one place.  It's all searchable and exportable when the time comes for you to actually stop your research to write.  It's compatible with Google Scholar (which I admit I'd never even heard of until last week), Amazon, the New York Times, Lexis Nexis, etc., with more sites coming into the fold all the time.  You put Zotero right into your Firefox web browser and go to town.  (It's not compatible with Internet Explorer -- take that, Bill Gates.)

At the very least, Zotero makes it so that I will never have to type in another bibliography -- Zotero captures all that info automatically online and puts it into whatever format I want -- and that I can keep all my notes in a single place rather than scattered in random Word files (at best) or the aforementioned post-it notes (at worst). 

Thanks to Tona Hangen for introducing me to this fancy-pants tool!

A New Career Direction

Well, after nine years as the Religion Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, I've decided that it is time to move on to new challenges.  July 18 will be my last day at PW, right after the International Christian Retail Show in Orlando.  I'm glad I'll have a chance to say good-bye to some of the special people from evangelical Christian houses I've worked with over the years, because in my new job I don't think I'm going to be attending ICRS. 

I am very excited about my next step!  I will be working 3/5 time as an acquisitions editor for Westminster John Knox Press, which is a great fit for my academic background and my interests in biblical studies, theology, and religion & popular culture.  (These are the people who brought us Mark Pinsky's The Gospel According to the Simpsons and other fine books.)   WJK is a terrific and stable company with super people who love books.  I am honored to be joining their team, and also glad that I can continue working from home less than full-time.  (I am beginning work on a new book of my own, a major study of Mormon adolescence in America.  It's going to take a good deal of time and travel to conduct the surveys and interviews.) 

I have been itching for several years now to get into acquisitions or agenting.  I want to be part of nourishing good books from the very beginning of the process.  I have loved my work with PW, but it's time to take Andy Crouch's suggestion and stop merely critiquing culture and start actually creating some.  (BTW, check out his new book Culture Making.  It's fantastic, and I say this as a completely impartial bystander, not at all swayed by the fact that Andy sang at my wedding.) 

I'll have three weeks off to rest, catch up on scrapbooking (as if), get over-involved in Olympic spectating and work more on my book proposal before I start my new position in August.  Thanks so much to all of you who have been nothing short of inspirational to me in my PW job.  I am privileged to still get to work with many of you and see you at trade shows and conferences.  After nearly a decade in the business, I still can't believe we actually get paid for this.

Five Summer Beach Reads . . .In Religion?

When I was at the beach last week (wonderful!), I did a taped radio interview with Interfaith Voices on religion beach reads.  Not sure there really is such a thing, but I tried to choose five spring and summer religion books that were entertaining as well as informative.  The interview was carried on radio stations this past week but apparently can still be heard at the show's website.   (My own beach reads last week were 2 YA novels, lots of home improvement magazines, and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, but I haven't gotten very far with that yet. I guess I go on vacation to get away from religion books.)

The lone novel was Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, which as I've blogged before marks a huge step up from the debut novel in this series.  It's as though she is now able to step away from the extensive research she has done on the life of Jesus, and can let her imagination take flight.  The story does what the best historical fiction aims to accomplish: to make the people of the past just as complex, just as frail and human, as anyone we know today.  All writers of historical fiction seem to believe they do this, but so few actually manage it that sometimes I despair of the whole genre.  Biblical fiction is especially susceptible to wooden and stilted characterizations, as authors bend over backwards not to offend.  Kudos to Rice for breaking the mold.  I am looking forward to her fall memoir Called Out of Darkness about her reconversion to Catholicism, which should give some background to her decision to write only religious novels.  (Although anyone who thinks her earlier horror novels weren't also deeply religious is not reading them very carefully.)

I also recommended a funny and surprisingly engaging biblical studies book The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book.  I never thought I would see a book successfully cross biblical studies with bathroom humor.  Scatology meets eschatology?  Whatever it is, it's quirky and unusual and actually very well-reasoned.  These chapters delve into both 1) the stories your Sunday School teacher hastily glossed over or liked to pretend weren't there, or 2) the stories you spent quite a bit of time on but never looked at in quiiiiiiite this way.  (The first chapter, which makes a linguistic argument for Eve being created from . . . wait for it! . . .Adam's missing penis bone is just the opening salvo.)  This book concentrates on the OT, so here's hoping for an NT sequel in the future.  I can only imagine what these authors will do with Paul's declaration that he counts everything as skubala save knowing Jesus as Lord.

Summer at the beach is often a time when people are thinking more consciously (or self-consciously) about bodies and sexuality. So pick 3 is Donna Freitas's new Oxford book Sex and the Soul, which looks at the disconnect between college students' spiritual beliefs and their sexual behavior, and the loneliness that often accompanies their choices.  I am moderating a panel at Sunstone in August where Donna is speaking, and we are so thrilled to have her coming.  The book is based on extensive, fascinating interviews.  (On a personal note --after reading it, I decided that the medieval chastity belt needs to be revived pretty soon here, as my 9-year-old is coming up on those scary puberty years.  Apparently these can now be purchased at lockmeup.com.  Awesome! Or, uh, bizarre  Who ARE these people?)

The other body-related book is Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body, a collection of essays on different aspects of the body.  I was especially interested in the tattoo section.  There are so many strong feelings about tattoos in the Jewish community, partly based on levitical proscriptions, partly based on Holocaust memories, and of course partly based in cultural and social norms.

And finally, I very much liked Tony Jones's book The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier.  In my mind it is the best introduction so far to the Emergent movement, mostly because it is written by an insider who has been with the movement since the beginning. Here's a link to the PW review, which I did not write, but with which I wholeheartedly agree.   One of the best aspects of the book is that it is grounded not just in theological discussions (which are generally very well argued -- check out his startling and wonderful idea of the church as a wiki!) but also in concrete Emergent communities.  I read this book on a plane to Kansas City, and was intrigued to learn of a vibrant Emergent church there.  I wish I had had time to visit it.  (Incidentally, Martin Marty was also on my flight, just by coincidence, and while we were riding together from the airport into town I told him a little bit about the book.  He seemed very interested in some of the questions raised by Emergent folks.  Please, someone, when I am eighty, will you make sure that I am still as intellectually curious and excited about new ideas as Martin Marty?!  Wow. Love him.) 

Back to The New Christians.  My only real complaint about it is one I've lodged at other Emergent fare, most notably Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy: these guys have got to stop shadowboxing so much.  At times they come out swinging, and at other times (like in the first 30 or so pages of McLaren!) they apologize all over themselves for not being sufficient experts in theological questions.  I know the Emergent folks receive an obscene amount of criticism--Emergent has even been added to some cult watch organizations as a dangerous religious movement that's out to snatch the bread of life from our children's very mouths, etc.  But I don't read books by Emergent folks to watch them fence their opponents; I read them because I love their new wine in old wineskins.  As Jones says, the gospel is simply too beautiful not to be true.  Let's have more of that.

Incidentally, Tony Jones has a terrific blog here. I am amazed by these folks who blog so often.  How do they find the time?  He is a very talented writer.