Greetings from Memphis, where I am attending the annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses. Memphis is just a couple hours’ drive from where I grew up, and I used to spend a lot of time here visiting friends and extended family up through the mid-1990s or so. However, the last time I was downtown was probably 2004 or 2005, and I can say that the last two decades have not been kind to this city. It took me just 2-3 minuets after getting off I-40 to reach the conference hotel in late afternoon traffic, but it was enough to convince that I would not want to drive, much less walk, through this area at night. It’s sad.
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My review of Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World has been published by the University Bookman. Here’s an excerpt from the evaluative section of the review:
Whereas most authors of books of this type come from a pastoral background, Renn is a management consultant and urban analyst. Although he does quote scripture and refer to Christian doctrine in several passages, Renn sticks mostly to his strengths of cultural analysis and strategy. This orientation will seem disorienting to some readers accustomed to pastoral writing about the church and society and refreshing to others.
Most of Renn’s recommendations to individuals seem in line with the advice evangelicals often receive from other sources. One can always find exhortations to upright living among Christian writers, although a slight difference here is that Renn leaves aside the usual pastoral encouragement to personal prayer and Bible study to focus on ethical behavior. His discussion of personal finance is compatible with that of figures like Dave Ramsey or Larry Burkett. Even some of his edgier recommendations seem well timed for an audience that is waking up to the realities of the negative world. For example, he insists that evangelicals be willing to disengage from mainstream institutions such as public schools when those institutions have turned against their values and there is no plausible strategy for influencing or recapturing them. With the rapid advance of school choice legislation in numerous states in the past few years, more evangelical families than ever are likely to consider this a viable strategy.
But where Renn’s ideas have the potential to turn more heads is in the area of institutional focus. For example, Renn suggests that medium-sized businesses owned by Christians become a “potential safe temporary landing place for anyone who loses a corporate job” in the local area. Judging from the state of the current public conversation on Christianity and culture, it seems safe to say that not one in ten church leaders has considered coordinating such a plan with their entrepreneurial congregants. However, the potential for this strategy to provide economic security and peace of mind to white collar employees under ideological pressure in their workplaces could be significant. Similarly, Renn’s recommendation to seek protection from cancellation by finding employment and building businesses in critical, essential sectors, for example, electrical infrastructure, is an idea I’ve seen referenced by only one other Christian writer in the past twenty-five years.
You can read the whole thing at the Bookman’s website. I’ll also link to it from the My Work Around the Web tab on this Substack’s homepage. If you have not yet read Renn’s book, I highly recommend it.
What I’m Reading
While I’m trying to get two more reviews written and a conference paper edited, I’m sticking with mostly junk fiction, but I did recently finish Fr. Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” podcast. It took me more than a year to listen through it all, but since you basically get a homily every day in addition to hearing the Bible read, I don’t feel too bad about not being able to keep strictly on schedule.
I’m also still working through Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly, which is quite a bit longer than the typical public affairs book, so my reading plate has stayed full.
Update
By any standard, this has been a full week. On Sunday and Monday, we participated in several local activities organized to celebrate the total eclipse that took place early Monday afternoon. Searcy was in the “path of totality,” and the skies were clear when the big event occurred. My family watched the eclipse from Harding’s football stadium, and the crowd’s mood was decidedly celebratory. I didn’t think there was anything strange about that, but apparently the mood was much more somber in some other places.
On Monday evening, Harding’s American Studies Institute hosted former astronaut Jerry Linenger, who spoke about his months aboard the Mir space station in the late 1990s. It was a riveting presentation.
Later that night, I hopped in the van with Sons #4 and #6 to drive 80 miles up the road to Walnut Ridge, where we got on Amtrak’s Texas Eagle around 2:00 a.m. and rode up to St. Louis, arriving at 7:30 Tuesday morning. We rode the Metrolink downtown, checked into the Hyatt Regency at the Arch, and spent the next two days watching Cardinals baseball and doing a few other touristy things. We really enjoyed the St. Louis Zoo, which boasts several animals we don’t get to see in Montgomery, including penguins, tiger cubs, and polar bear (a POLAR BEAR!!).
We also went to the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, which was just a couple of blocks from our hotel. I visited an acquaintance who works there, and the in-house museum includes a 28-lb. gold bar (worth more than $1 million at the current spot price) that we were allowed to lift.
And yes, we went to the top of the Gateway Arch on Wednesday afternoon. Unfortunately, visibility was not good that day, but it was still a good experience for the boys, who had never been there before.
But the biggest reason for the trip was baseball. We saw the Cardinals play the Phillies in Busch Stadium on Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon and had a great time both days, even though the weather wasn’t really cooperative on Wednesday. On Tuesday, presumptive ace Sonny Gray made his Cardinals debut and pitched five shutout innings. We had some close calls, including a bases-loaded jam in the seventh, but ultimately the bullpen held, and we won 3-0.
Wednesday we took a tough loss 4-3 that could largely be laid at the feet of a rookie center fielder who was playing AA ball a few weeks ago, but who got brought up to the bigs because our whole outfield is seemingly injured right now. His first-inning error led to two unearned Phillies runs, and then his baserunning error later in the game cost us another run. Oh, well! We had seats in the Champions Club that day, so we enjoyed wonderful food and stayed nice and dry on a drizzly day.
We came back to Arkansas on the train Wednesday night, arriving in Searcy around 2:00 a.m. I got a half-day in at the office Thursday before coming out to Memphis for this conference, which I’ll write more about next week after having a chance to digest things.