Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

This semiannual perusal of new books shows how broadly our faith reaches—or needs to reach —as we seek to follow Jesus each day.

Spirituality: Richard Rohr is an outstanding preacher and teacher, and that shows in his books, which include many catchy sentences that sum up his helpful lessons about spirituality.

His most recent books are A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer (HiddenSpring, 2011, $15) and Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2011, $19.95).

While both books embrace themes common to many of Rohr’s books, these add their own emphases. A Lever summarizes Rohr’s integration of action and contemplation by calling for the need for “(1) a strong tolerance for ambiguity, (2) an ability to allow, forgive and contain a certain degree of anxiety and (3) a willingness to not know and not even need to know.”

Such characteristics also fit what Rohr labels “the second half of life.” This does not have to do with chronological age but spiritual maturity. In the first half, “we are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them—both immature responses.” Our churches, he writes, often keep people in the first half and don’t call for real transformation.

What he calls “falling” is a letting go, a surrender to the mercy of God. This is difficult because “the human ego prefers anything … to falling or changing or dying.” But those who fall experience God’s “great outpouring.”

Science: Perhaps one of the more significant books to come out recently that addresses science and religion is Darwin’s Pious Idea:Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong by Conor Cunningham (Eerdmans, 2010, $34.99). Cunningham, whose expertise is in theology and philosophy, makes a thorough case arguing the thesis in his subtitle.

He attacks the “foolish wisdom” of many atheists and the “learned ignorance” of many Christians. He goes after the popular ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins, whose “veneration of selfishness, rendering it almost absolute, is also anti-evolutionary (just as creationism is antitheological).”

By exploring what Darwin actually taught and what scientists have learned about evolution, Cunningham uses simple logic to render the fundamentalist views of Dawkins and others nonsensical. “Evolutionary psychology,” for example, “involves a great deal of mythology, and a plethora of untestable, post hoc explanations,” he writes.

The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, edited by John Polkinghorne (Eerdmans, 2010, $30), takes a different approach. It includes 13 essays by scientists and theologians that address the idea that, as Polkinghorne writes, “The universe is deeply relational in its character and unified in its structure, because it is the creation of the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Politics: Two new books engage us around political theology. The Politics of Discipleship:Becoming Posmaterial Citizens by Graham Ward (BakerAcademic, 2009, $25) is difficult but worth the effort. Ward examines the political nature of our postmodern world and calls the church to “perform Christ in every microcontext … to recognize and own the politics of discipleship.”

Migrations of the Holy: God, State and the Political Meaning of the Church by William T. Cavanaugh (Eerdmans, 2011, $18) is more accessible and urges Christians “not to invest the entirety of their political presence in [the ‘powers and principalities’ of our age].”

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.