Hands down, my favorite book title of this year is the new volume from the folks at The Other Journal ‘God is Dead’ and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself: Theological Engagements with the New Atheism, edited by Andrew David, Chris Keller, and Jon Stanley (Wipf & Stock, 2010). (The publisher has generously offered a 40% discount for those readers of the Church and Postmodern Culture—just click on the link above and use the coupon code GID10 to get the discount.)
In addition to having a great title, you get an added bonus: it’s also a fabulous book! Rather than playing the apologetic game on the new atheists’ rules, this volume brings together a creative mix of genres (essays, interviews, art and poetry) in a constructive vision that is only obliquely a ‘response’ to the new atheism. And it includes some of the most significant voices in contemporary thought, including Charles Taylor, Stanley Fish, John Milbank, Merold Westphal, Luci Shaw, Stanley Hauerwas, and many others. So I thought I’d pose a few questions to a couple of the editors, Chris Keller and Jon Stanley. I hope you’ll enjoy listening in on the conversation.
JKAS: This book grows out of articles that originally appeared in The Other Journal. Could you tell us a little bit about the journal? How’d it get started? What defines it?
Chris Keller: Yes, I started The Other Journal in 2003 with a good friend of mine Brian Munz. We initially envisioned the journal as a platform for graduate students to publish their work and foster dialogue with other students around the globe. I thought this was a good idea partly because at the time I had so many friends studying theology at excellent seminaries and graduate schools around the country, and partly because I had come to the conclusion in my own journey that it’s absolutley insane that people don’t, or wouldn’t, take theology more seriously than they do. Because theology deals with ultimate realities of existence, and everyone has arguments for what they believe (even if their arguments are anti-intellectual), it just boggled my mind there weren’t more publishing outfits that were explicitly featuring theological discourse and exploring it’s role in society at large…But I digress. Very soon after we launched we were pleasantly surprised by who was interested in a dialogue with us, so we quickly transitioned from featuring graduate students to featuring leading Christian thinkers, activists, and artists. Our editorial team was built slowly as we created a network around the publication, and seven years later we have an excellent editorial staff and modest budget that enables us to publish content weekly throughout the year.
Jon Stanley: My side of the story of how TOJ got started begins at the Café Vitrola on Capital Hill in Seattle. We’d meet their quite often and on this occasion before we had taken our first sip of coffee Chris said, ‘I’m going to start an online journal and I want you to be in on it.’ My response was along the lines of ‘You’ve gone mad…but of course I’m in.’ I’d already learned to trust Chris’ reads over the years; whether it’s as a friend, therapist, thinker, or cultural connoisseur, he’s got an incredible knack for seeing what’s out there and what’s needed, and when he talked with me about the theological lacuna in the publishing world, and the niche he wanted TOJ to hit—if I recall the pitch went something like, ‘polychromatic Christian commentary that is simultaneously rigorous and accessible by leading thinkers, activists, and artists on theological themes, social movements, political events, and cultural phenomena’—how could I resist?
All of us at TOJ are really indebted to Chris and Brian’s leadership: Chris on the publishing side and Brian on the technical side. This book has really been a crucial and gratifying part of us hitting our stride as of late, and we’re thoroughly enjoying feeling the wind in our face. And yes, roughly half of the content of ‘God is Dead’ and I Don’t Feel so Good Myself was initially published in our ‘Atheism’ issue (summer 2008). We were fortunate to receive some stellar contributions from the likes of Charles Taylor, John Milbank, Merold Westphal, Charles Mathewes, Luci Shaw, et ceterra, and the issue was really well received by our readership, so it wasn’t long before we knew we had the makings of a book that could really be of service to a broader audience regarding a crucial issue—postsecular theological engagements with both the new atheism and secular critiques of Christian faith and religious culture at large. From there it was a matter of strategizing about what bases and angles to cover to round out the volume. D. Stephen Long wrote us a foreword that wonderfully frames the discussion and that makes a substantive contribution to the discussion in its own right. We were thrilled to be able to host a conversation between the ‘two Stanley’s,’ Stanley Hauerwas and Stanley Fish. And the images from Paul Roorda’s art exhibit The Skeptic’s Gospel and Other Remedies for Truth really adds something that even the best prose is unable to communicate. Needless to say, we are extremely grateful to all of our contributors for their unique and incisive contributions and absolutely thrilled with the way this book has come together.
JKAS: So who do you envision as the readers for The Other Journal? Do you have a sense of who is reading it?
Chris: Well, we know that professors assign TOJ articles for their graduate and undergraduate courses. Seminarians and religious studies s tudents read it. We also know that Christian critical thinkers who probably tend toward more progressive modes of Christian practice, and Christian artists and folks with aesthetic s ensibilities and interests, read it. We are also housed at and partnered with the Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle so people associated with the school read it, and of course there is a heavy concentration of readership in the Seattle area.
Jon: Knowing our readership is really important to us—not so that we can congratulate ourselves that we’re read by this person or that person, or that our readership is growing in this city or that (though we are big in Sydney)—but so that we can gauge how closely we are keeping to our initial vision. We’ve evolved over the years of course, but the pitch Chris made to me seven years ago still characterizes every project we do, whether it’s our quarterly journal, our books with Wipf and Stock, or our annual Film, Faith, and Justice Festival.
Part of the lacuna in the Christian publishing world is that there’s (at least) three ‘notches’ between the scholarly and the popular, which excludes a lot of people who might either feel bored or discouraged when interacting with one of these two genres. So for our online quarterly, we like to say, ‘our goal is to be a-notch-and-a-half more accessible than a typical scholarly journal and a-notch-and-a-half more rigorous than a typical popular magazine.’ In my first-year undergraduate social statistics course my political science professor used to take delight in using ‘sound scientific procedures’ to demonstrate that people who read Playboy tend to prefer wine to beer and that people who read Hustler tend to prefer beer to wine. In this sense we don’t want to be either a wine or beer drinker’s journal. I mean, there’s just so many genres of wonderful libations out there that this binary leaves sadly untapped.
The various ‘sections’ of the journal are intended to address this as well. Having sections dedicated to accessible-academic articles; book, film, and music reviews; web-tours of art exhibitions; various forms of creative writing; a wide range of blogs; and social justice essays, really serves a broad readership. Our hope is that any thinking Christian, any thinking person really, could find something of value in TOJ. We’d love to see more cross-pollination, you know, more academics perusing the art exhibits, and more activists reading the more scholarly essays. To borrow a basketball metaphor, if you’re naturally right- handed TOJ is a place to learn to ‘go left’, to become more interdisciplinarily dextrous and adept.
JKAS: Is there any sense in which you think the journal is a uniquely “Seattle” venture?
Chris: Seattle is not culturally Christian by any means, in fact many segments of it are quite anti-Christian. When I visit my parents in Orlando, Florida, for instance, there are Christian fish all over cars alongside Christian radio stickers; you see Christian billboards quoting things God allegedly said in black and white schemata (“When I said love your neighbor I really meant it” – God). In Seattle you’re more likely to get Darwin fish rather than ichthuses, and some of these Darwin fish are shown humping Christian fish (touché!), so you really see a toxic disdain toward ‘Christianity’ as portrayed by the dominate evangelical culture(s). Such an environment is oddly refreshing to me, however, because the cultural stuff I never liked anyway has been shorn off by an acerbic culture. When I moved to Seattle after attending university in the cornfields of Indiana I really had to reflect anew on what faith is, what stays, what goes, what Christianity is and isn’t, et cetera…
So there certainly is a sense in which the journal is a distinctly Seattle venture in that we’re concerned with bare, honest Christian expression that is theologically self-conscious but resists erudition. We need better ‘gateway drugs’ in the Christian community, and we want the journal to be a gateway drug and slippery slope toward the theological bounty and cornucopia of resources that are available in the Christian tradition but obscured by an amnesiac culture with a very short attention span. As Stanley Fish says in this book, ‘religion has been asking the right kinds of questions for thousands of years’ about what it means to be fully human and to pursue justice, solidarity, and resourcefullness in our personal, social, and political relationships. Of course, there have been better and worse answers to these questions, but these are questions that need to be kept on the table and ever before us, particularly if we are to avoid the arid reductionisms of late-modernity and work toward achieving more open societies and more sustainable ways of life.
Seattle’s low-grade (and sometimes high-grade) hostility toward Christianity has been met with different responses from various Christians and Christian groups. The militant-anti-hippy-take-Jesus-seriously-you-depraved-piece-of-crap approach is certainly popular among some Christian groups here. But we prefer, along with folks at Mars Hill Graduate School, Image Journal, Mustard Seed Associates, and numerous churches and artist communities all over the city, to work to recover a Christian aesthetic that affirms a Trinitarian theology and expresses an ontology of love.
Jon: I have a deep affection for Seattle, and I wouldn’t want to discount the ways in which TOJ is indeed a uniquely Seattle venture any more than I would want to discount my own social location and formation—by the ways in which I’ve been shaped by this city; by the ways in which I am a product of the unique constellation of forces, institutions, networks, aspirations, and practices that is ‘Seattle;’ by the ways in which each and every one of us is simultaneously shaping and shaped by the cities in which we live and which live through us.
I’ve recently been reading Graham Ward’s Cities of God. And even though it is true that certain segments of Seattle are quite self-consciously anti-Christian, I have to say that if I allow the criteria Ward proposes (drawing upon Augustine, Aquinas, and others) to discern the extent to which a city is actually ‘of God’—a city that promotes the health, sustenance, enjoyment, protection, and religious aspirations of its people—to be a lens through which I read this least-churched city in North America, then I can’t deny that in many ways this ‘pagan’ city is actually more substantially ‘of God’ than most (in normative sense of being both a ‘good city’ and a ‘city of the good’). It’s a city that, to me, despite its reputation, is quite unwittingly Christian, and that invites it’s openly Christian inhabitants to learn to understand, stylize, and perform their faith other-wise, that is, with a different wisdom—just to hint at how we chose our name. Not to mention the coffee is great.
JKAS: I’ve heard good things about the beer, too (though the Oregonians contest that!). But your analysis here re minds me of Zizek’s comment that only a Christian like Tolkien could have created such as wonderfully pagan world as we find in Middle Earth. So I’m very sympathetic to imagining that Seattle is closer to the city of God than Grand Rapids, MI (G-R-usalem, as we call it).
Jon: Ha! I wasn’t aware of Zizek’s comment, but I like it. It reminds me of Moltmann’s quip that ’only a Christian can be a good atheist.’ And now we’re talking, Jamie: we need more Christians like Tolkein, more atheists like Zizek, and more ‘wonderfully pagan’ cities. In that light, if I could just highlight one thing in particular it would be the Pacific Northwest sensibility that life is less about ‘making a buck’ and ‘winning the rat race’ and more about ‘doing what you love’—something that echoes Augustine’s invitation to ’ love God and do what you want.’ And I’m not talking about a narcissistic enjoyment that is bereft of sacrifice, but a true jouissance (or deep pleasure) that has the texture, maturity, and complexity of a Columbia region pinot noir, or a Yakima region stout—again, let’s not be dualists with respect to libations here. So what this means for us at TOJ is that we know that if we’re not truly enjoying what we’re doing—learning, growing, taking risks, opening ourselves to difference, you know, having fun—then we really won’t be of true service to our readers. That’s why every single issue, from the topics we choose to the writers we solicit, begins with the questions, ‘What do we want to expose ourselves to next? What do we want to learn? Who do we need to be reading right now?’ We believe that if we have integrity to these questions then the rest will take care of itself—and if not, then at least we’ll have had fun together.
JKAS: My impression has always been that the Pacific northwest is kind of like a slice of Norway within the 48 contiguous states (though you guys have much better beer!). But there is a kind of European secularity that characterizes Seattle and Portland, isn’t there?
Chris: An astute observation, particularly the part about the beer (which I might add, is better than Portland’s). Yeah as I said earlier, there absolutely is a secularity that characterizes the Pacific Northwest. We typically win the honors of being the most “un-churched city” in the country. There is also a certain seclusion from the rest of the country; you certainly feel far away from Wall Street and the Beltway up here, close to Canada, land-locked, insulated by clouds and rain and mountain ranges. Something is psychologically different, and I don’t mean simply in terms of psychopathology (we have higher rates of serial killers and seasonal depression), but it’s an iconoclastic posture and awareness that public life–from aesthetics to economics–can always be better imagined.
Jon: I agree that Seattle is characterized by a certain ‘European secularity’, and I can certainly attest to the feeling of being ‘far away’, and even a bit psychologically off-kilter at times. However, I think each of these three characteristics (more so the first two, but let’s not discount the significance of the third) actually make Seattle the city in North America that is poised to be on the vanguard of the ’postsecular’ era that is imminently approaching, if it’s not already here.
First, it really is a European-style secularity rather than an American-style secularity, so with less of the old money and blue blood than some of the more established and entrenchedly secular cities in America, it’s more open to so-called ‘thick descriptions’ of value and the significance of the role of religious discourse in life and society. Second, it is far away, but I think this actually provides Seattlites with a certain critical distance that allows for a unique analysis of our cultural moment—
JKAS: Well, Sarah Palin was pretty far away up there in Alaska (and so close to Russia!), but that didn’t seem to help with ‘critical distance.’
Jon: Ha! Well played, but Seattle’s not Alaska. This region invites proposals that are able to transcend the binaries that reinforce the battle lines of the culture wars. After all, the heart of the emerald city bleeds Green rather than either Red or Blue. And with regard to the third, let’s be honest, you have to be a little off-kilter if you’re going to have the mettle to jam a monkey wrench into the late-modern globocapitalist machine every now and then. Let’s just say it’s not only for rhyming reasons that the documentary chronicling the WTO protests in Seattle (1999) isn’t entitled, ‘The Battle in Charleston’. So, my chips are down on Seattle as a site of resistance against the depoliticization that characterizes the secular cities of late modern culture.
JKAS: Do you think the unique context of the Pacific Northwest was behind your interest in tackling “the new atheism?”
Chris: Somewhat, yes. The obvious reason for putting together a book is that there has just been so much new atheism literature over the past few years. But then—and this ties into our particularity—everyone who is a Christian in this city is living as a Christian in the midst of a general population that has Bill Maher sensibilities, and thinks Christian faith is simply ‘Religulous’. Does being a person of faith essentially mean living a life that is running blind on the wheels of faith? That’s what pisses Maher off so much. But here’s the catch: that’s what pisses our readership off as well—the anti-intellectualism that grows like a fungus in some Christian cultures. As for Christian responses, we see folks all the time “respond” to atheism with all sorts of tactics like anger, sarcasm, vitriol; the people who do it best in my opinion realize there is an art form and humility to being a person of faith and that we must be in dialogue with people different than ourselves. As Brian McLaren says in his endorsement, ‘atheism isn’t just something to oppose or refute—it also can be a mirror, with much to teach us about ourselves and our distorted and unworthy ideas about God and religion.’ So when we were soliciting content a few years ago for this issue I really felt the pressing need to think about what an authentic response to the new atheism might look like, one that might be able to have some traction in a city like Seattle. I don’t really see the new atheism as a threat to the Christian faith, as such, but it certainly does pose a serious (and much needed) threat to certain iterations of the Christian faith. I don’t feel, most days, offended or threatened by the new atheism, but this is a much more interesting and culturally significant conversation to have than, say, tithing or porn.
Jon: Yes, with respect to secularity, if you begin to analyze the foundations of the rise of secularism itself, as Charles Taylor (who is interviewed in the book) has done in his recent book A Secular Age, you begin to see both the new atheists and their typical Christian critics as strange bedfellows, at each other’s throats by day, yet ultimately bedding down together by night within what Taylor calls the ‘immanent frame’. So, yes, approaching the new atheist debate from the vantage point of the postsecular opens the door to a deeper analysis and a more creative response to both the new atheists and their critics. This is the kind of book we felt the market hadn’t yet produced, with it’s penchant for pursuing profit rather than substance by relentlessly preaching to the choirs on both sides of the culture wars. So we partnered with Wipf and Stock and decided to produce an other kind of book.
A guage for us really was whether it could play in Peoria, so to speak, or in this case whether it could be read in Seattle, which means it has to be able to be able to darken the doors of both the churches and the bars, and speak winningly to both of their inhabitants, pissing them off enough to gain their respect and keep their interest yet without crossing the line and getting bounced. We think we’ve been successful in this way, putting together a book that is unflinchingly Christian, and that simultaneously learns from and speaks redemptively to both sides of the debate. When Chris and I studied the doctrine of revelation in graduate school our professor liked to say that if God can speak through Balaam’s donkey then he can certainly speak through other asses, so our desire is to be damn good listeners and readers of culture. In this way, the book really is a unique ‘response’ to the new atheist debate, one that we’re proud of, and one that we believe is both needed and worth reading.
JKAS: One of the things I love about God is Dead and I Don’t Fell So Good Myself is its refusal of one genre. While it includes provocative essays, there are also som e fabulous interviews, poetry, visual art, slice of memoir. Do you see tha t mixing of genres as its own kind of “response” to the new atheists?
Chris: Yes we like mixing genres because different mediums allow for different access to reality. Reality is multidimensional, so we try to refract numerous colors while still remaining distinctly theological. It is a response to the new atheists because it gives witness to what Charles Taylor says in this book when he notes that, “If you do have such a view that everything is to be explained in terms of physics and the movement of atoms and the like, then certain forms of access to God [and reality] are just closed.” In employing poetry, prose, and different forms of visual art, we are wanting to account for the fullness of the human experience. Even if the fact that our response is in the form of a ‘book’ limits the extent to which this can be done, I think we’re knocking on the right door.
Jon: It’s natural for us to mix genres in the book, in part because our online quarterly mixes genres as well, and as Chris has already said, behind this lies the intention to do as much justice as possible to both the fullness of human experience in all its modes and the great variedness and pluriformity of God’s good creation. As we say in our preface to the book, if the new atheists debate needs anything it is an opening up rather than a closing down, and ‘telling it slant’ through different genres and modes of discourse is an attempt to do exactly that. Poems serve as bookends/openings to the project and images from a stunning art exhibition by Paul Roorda serve as an intermezzo for the reader.
And yes, this mixing of genres is exactly part of the response (and no small part at that) because it exposes and resists the reductionisms (in the areas of anthropology, epistemology, and ontology, to name a few) that are inscribed in the new atheists’ critiques of Christian faith and religious culture. But again I want to emphasize that many of those same reductionisms are inscribed in the typical Christian responses to the new atheists as well. This is exemplified in the attempts by the new atheists and their critics to scientifically prove the existence or nonexistence of God, respectively, something I’m sure is causing both Nietzsche and Chesterton to roll over in their graves, and something we have absolutely no interest in getting involved in either—as James H. Olthuis says in his endorsement, ‘God is not an explanation.’ However, we do want to point out to both sides of the debate the inherent and shared problematics in such a project, which I think the book does very well.
Jamie, you have really spoken to this in your endorsement by saying, ‘The very shape of this book is a response to the New Atheism precisely because it refuses their narrow imagination and rationalist fundamentalism.’ You’ve already said it better here than either of us can, and it feels really gratifying to know that this emphasis comes through in the book.
JKAS: This book is another partnership between you guys and the folks just south of you in Oregon, Wipf & Stock Publishers. Is this the sign of a “Pacific Northwest” theological movement? What’s next for you guys?
Chris: The folks at Wipf and Stock are amazing, and there is much we admire and appreciate about them. This is our third book with Wipf and Stock, after Remembering the Future (2009) and Jesus Girls (2009), the first book in our Experiences in Evangelicalism Series. I’m not sure if its a ‘theological movement,’—though I do like the sound of that—but we are planning quite a few projects with them in the future and their publication model is perfect for what we want to do, which essentially is to publish books that we think are important without the tremendous burden of having to sell 100,000 books every printing, not that we’d talk anyone out of purchasing the book.
I guess one reason I feel a real connection with Wipf and Stock is that they are passionate as well about theology; they think it matters. That might sound obtuse and circular, but I feel solidarity with them because of a shared conviction that it is important for Christians who are critically engaged with their culture and with their faith to remain robustly ‘Christian’, and it’s this piece that is really exciting. In this book John Milbank says, “‘Left Christians’ now have much more to stress the Christian bit if they are truly going to be able to make a critical intervention.” This is of course true for all Christians, left or right leaning, but stressing the Christian bit is a somewhat funny and challenging reproach to Christians in a time disciplined by pseudo-events and political malaise. Learning to ”stress the Christian bit” in a way that is both grounded and open is crucial, and I hope this book helps the reader with that all important question.
Jon: We’re really grateful to be accomplices with the folks at both the Mars Hill Graduate School and Wipf and Stock Publishers. A friend of mine often says that if theology was the queen of the sciences in the premodern world then the modern world relegated it to the position of the drag queen. Now I have no interest in putting theology back on the throne, and I have not the least problem with dragqueens, but perhaps it is time in our postmodern, or even post-postmodern, world to rethink the discipline of theology itself and reconsider the role of religion and religious discourse in contemporary life and society. I guess what I really appreciate about Wipf and Stock, and Mars Hill for that matter, is that they are each in their own way trying to awaken theology from it’s own ‘dogmatic slumber’ and allow it be more undisciplined, unruly, and effective as the leavening agent and orienting discourse in society that it is when it is at its best.