How to Think Like Shakespeare - A Review

The list of books I have purchased because of Ken Myers and his Mars Hill Audio Journal continues to grow. Though subscriptions to the journal run about $30, regular listeners are likely to find the actual cost of the journal and the free, weekly Friday Features much greater because Myers has the gift of bibliography. He also brings such interesting people in for interviews or reads such enthralling essays that curious minds will find it difficult not to want to follow where he leads. For those without robust university libraries nearby, the cost of following those intellectual breadcrumbs can rise as online orders and regular deliveries from the postman serve to dish up fuel for the mind.

One recent book that I purchased because of Ken Myers is How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. The author, Scott Newstok is a professor of English at Rhodes College. He has previously published on both Shakespeare and renaissance education. In this volume, published with Princeton University Press, Newstok brings those ideas together.

How to Think Like Shakespeare sounds like a “how to” manual. Thankfully, it is not, though that might annoy some who pick up the volume thinking it will provide “10 easy steps to better writing” or whatever.

In an interview with Myers, Newstok related that one of the driving forces behind his writing the book was a rejection of the education-industrial complex. His daughter, enrolled in a public school, came home muttering about “assessment,” which is code for “high stakes testing to justify money spent on novel methods with unproven results which may not have a valid goal in mind.” The problem with assessment is that it pushes toward educating in measurable information without necessarily considering whether the end goal is right and proper. What could have turned into a manifesto is framed much more positively, though, as Newstok provides a framework for considerations for the Renaissance Mind.

The purpose of this book is to help reframe the goal of education around more human considerations. Newstok writes:

My conviction is that education must be about thinking––not training a set of specific skills. . . . Education isn’t merely accumulating data; machines can memorize far more, and far less fallibly, than humans.

The best way to learn about thinking is not to hire a neuroscientist to measure the electrical activity in the brain, but to watch how others have thought before. Since we do not have a time machine to travel back to meet Shakespeare or other thinkers who lived before our technology-saturated age, we must consider what they have written and follow the trails they have followed.

How to Think About Shakespeare takes an intriguing approach. In a world that prizes originality, the book is comprised largely of quotes and tight allusions. Newstok is fastidious in his annotation, so this is no plagiarist’s volume. However, what is illustrated is the great degree that we are dependent upon those that have come before us. In many cases, they have already thought better with clearer language about the things that we consider imponderable.

The book has fourteen chapters, which all deal with particular issues relevant to human thinking and our contemporary culture. For example, Newstok begins with “Of Thinking,” which is appropriate considering the title of the volume. The upshot being that the lament “why can’t people think” is not a new problem driven by smart phones (though perhaps accelerated), but one that spans the intellectual history of the world. The conclusion we might draw from that is that it may be better to see how the problem has been overcome in the past and model our solutions off of that, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Newstok then moves on to discuss ends, craft, fit, place, attention, and more. All the topics serve to outline aspects of human thought in a humane world. Each of the chapters is brief—usually about a dozen pages, which keeps the pace quick while providing some material for future consideration.

How to Think Like Shakespeare is not so much earthshattering as paradigm disrupting. It’s hard to define, really, but this is book that caused me to think and is still nagging at me to continue thinking. Mostly, it’s driving me to continue to explore what it means to be human and to think as a human in a computerized world. Newstok’s brief chapters highlight the ways that we have been habituated to a technological society. He doesn’t provide a lot of clear answers, but he raises some of the more significant questions that we should be asking and which humanity has previously asked. This is the sort of book that I read and have dipped into several times as I’ve mulled its contents since then. The book is one that that will stick with you at the edge of your mind and encourage dabbling.

How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Skills for Scholars)

By Newstok, Scott

Buy on Amazon

We Need to Recover Virtue

Until a few years ago there was a lot of talk among orthodox Christians about character. Public concern for character has eroded as political tides have shifted. But throughout the history of Christianity character—that is, embodied virtue—has been a consistent focus of discipleship.

The term virtue has been less commonly discussed among Protestants than among Roman Catholics. Due to the primary focus on Scripture, Protestants have leaned toward deontological ethics. Obedience to the duties outlined in Scripture have framed the way that many Protestant Christians discuss holiness. Among Roman Catholics there is a more robust tradition of virtue ethics and the pursuit of virtue, not least because of the work of Thomas Aquinas on the subject, though one finds similar language in Augustine and others.

One common objection to virtue talk among Protestants is that it enables a drift from Scripture. Situational ethics, for example, is a version of virtue ethics that emphasizes one virtue––that of love, ambiguously defined. Situation ethics can be used to justify violation of the clear requirements of Scripture in the name of virtue. Similarly, in versions of virtue ethics (like that espoused by Blanchard and O’Brien in An Introduction to Christian Environmentalism) adherents sometimes justify obvious disobedience to Scripture (as with acts of violence and property destruction) in the name of some other virtue. The vagueness of virtue language has made this approach to ethics and discipleship unpopular especially among conservative evangelicals.

The ambiguity of virtue language and the potential for drift is real, but the price of abandoning the pursuit of virtue is taking a significant toll on the public witness of conservative Christians. A duty-based ethics, absent the guardrails of virtuous character, can fall into self-justification and casuistry very quickly. In practice it often looks like finding proxy sinners to do the dirty work. We can promote an unscrupulous politician, even if we cannot ourselves engage in similar skullduggery. More concerning that voting for one of several bad options is cheering on the misdeeds of the dark hero, which is where the motives of our hearts are revealed.

There is room for a re-engagement in virtue thinking among evangelicals. Indeed, I believe it to be absolutely necessary. Pursuit of virtue must, of course, be filled with the content of Scripture, but we must go beyond proof-texts and seeking bare duties if holiness is going to become the signature quality of evangelicals.

If we are to pursue virtue, we will likely find help from the Roman Catholic tradition, because they have more consistently maintained a focus on virtue. Some instances of this are more helpful than others, but as with any theology, we should be prepared to chew the meat and spit the bones.

Romano Guardini’s book, Learning the Virtues That Lead You to God is a helpful place to begin. The title gives away the fact that Guardini sees virtues as a way of gaining merit that can increase the likelihood of salvation or reduce time in Purgatory, but setting those important considerations aside, there is deep value in studying the virtues as Guardini presents them.

After a brief preface, Guardini considers the nature of virtue, where he lays the groundwork of virtue from Greek philosophy (particularly Plato) and argues that the pursuit of virtue is an incremental work that believers should begin with the virtues that are most familiar to them. There are sixteen meditations that follow, each on a different virtue. These are not the classical virtues, but sixteen character traits including truthfulness, patience, justice, reverence, disinterestedness, kindness, gratitude, and others. As Guardini notes in his preface, “This interpretation shall be carried out in a very unsystematic way.” The book concludes with a brief meditation on justice before God, which attempts to bring unity to the previous chapters and encourages the pursuit of holistic virtue. The conclusion is the least satisfying chapter for someone in the Augustinian tradition, because it ends on a minor key of perpetual pursuit rather than comfort in Christ.

Learning the Virtues that Lead You to God is a book that deserves to be read slowly. While we might not agree with Guardini on the purpose of a pursuit of virtue, there is a great deal of wisdom in the pages.

In dealing with Justice, Guardini notes, “All criticism should begin with ourselves, and with the intention of improving things. Then we would soon see how much goes wrong because we do not permit the other person to be who he is and do not give him the room which he requires.”

While considering reverence, Guardini writes, “In the measure in which cultural evolution progressed, and a rational understanding and technical mastery of the world increased, the religious element receded. The concept of significance and value became predominant and awakened a respectful attitude in which there was still an echo of the old awe, that feeling of reverence of which we are speaking and by which a man of proper discernment still pays tribute to greatness.”

Writing about disinteredness: “The power of personality stems from the genuineness of life, the truth of thought, the pure will to work, and the sincerity of one’s disposition.”

Wrestling with courtesy, we read: “We must emphasize another point, something that has a direct effect on people’s dealings with each other; namely, the lack of time. Courtesy requires time. In order to exercise it, we must stop and wait; we must make a detour and we must be considerate and defer our own affairs. But all this takes time, and in our age of forced deadlines, of precisely functioning machinery, of the high costs of construction, and of fierce competition, the loss of time is something useless, irrational, erroneous, and even wicked.”

These few quotes help show the flavor of the chapters and demonstrate why this is a book that deserves to be read slowly and repeatedly. We need not agree with everything Guardini says, but there is value in hearing him say it and considering it carefully for application in our own lives.

Learning the Virtues: That Lead You to God

By Romano Guardini

Buy on Amazon

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes - A Review

One of my best recent investments has been in a subscription to the Mars Hill Audio Journal.

I’ve known about Ken Myers for years, but with so many free podcasts and sermons, I’ve never felt justified in paying for the material. I was tremendously wrong.

The first inkling of the error of my delay came when I purchased a single edition, “The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis,” because one of the contributors to that edition also contributed to a book I was editing with the same title. After I listened to that hour-long recording a few times, I was ready to plunge into a full subscription.

Since I began listening to Ken Myers conducting interviews on a regular basis, I decided to finally pick up a copy of his book, All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture. The book was originally released in 1989, but has remained in print since. Crossway released a reprint edition with a new introduction in 2012. In the world of publishing, that is a pretty significant record for longevity. It is well deserved.

The constant refrain of Myers and Mars Hill Audio Journal is to pursue permanent things. So much of what passes for culture in our age is intentionally temporary and of little durable value. Modernism, which is a nebulous movement with many tentacles, demands that we believe that what is new and shiny must be better than what is old and well-worn.

Myers’ book is intended for Christians, it is not a generic critique of culture for a broad audience. It offers a consistent reminder that Christianity should have its own unique culture, which should have a distinct shape. And, since that shape is caused by the character of our immutable, impassible God, it stands to reason that an authentically Christian culture should seek after permanent things.

More significant, I think, to Myers is that Christianity should reflect a degree of excellence in its culture, rather than subsisting on the edges of the mainstream of popular culture, picking up the crumbs and copying the worst trends of a few months or years ago.

In this way All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes espouses something similar to Andy Crouch’s concept in Culture Making or what T. M. Moore argues for in Culture Matters. In some way, Myers also seems to be pushing for the recovery and restoration of permanent institutions, much as James Davidson Hunter does in To Change the World. All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes was a foretaste of what the Mars Hill Audio Journal would become four years later. It is a vision that has withstood the past thirty years quite well.

The book begins by describing the dangers of popular culture, beginning with its tendency toward trendiness. Everything is temporary and disposable. There is an immediate gratification that finds itself fulfilled primarily in a disenchanted materialism. That bleeds into the way that even Christians make decisions, where dollars and cents are the only real consideration for vocational changes and entertainment selection. The soul is not fully considered.

As Christians, Myers argues, we should be seeking after durable things. We should seek to value beauty, goodness, and truth. Those are qualities to our distinctly Christian culture that should go beyond merely gluing a Bible verse onto the cover of a journal or modifying rock and roll lyrics to have a gospel-centered vibe. Instead, we should be looking for transcendent qualities in our literature and our music.

This means that sometimes we will prefer art that has been created by non-Christians much more than that that has been created by believers. Because, if a novel points us deeper into the human experience as it ought to be, then that is a cultural artifact that deserves preservation. At the same, Christians should be more capable of creating those durable works of art because we should have a stronger sense of the transcendent, because the transcendent God lives within us immanently.

This is the tragedy of Christian sub-culture. Too often it is kitsch and cliché. Too often it is derivative. Instead of forming new Austens and Dostoevskys, popular Christian culture knocks off Danielle Steel. Biblical manhood becomes a caricature of tavern culture, except without the good beer. Our worship music starts to sound like the top 40, except without the resonance that even that tissue paper culture has.

Myers calls us to a deeper relationship with culture. To cultivate enjoyment in complex artforms that exalt the human soul, lifting them toward God. This is hard work, as he notes, but it is also an act of worship.

The downside of Myers perspective is that he seems to cut himself off from those occasional snippets of popular culture that use a throwaway medium to make a deeper point. For Myers, good music seems to end with Bach, though he’s willing to accept the value of Jazz. And yet, there are times when the collective weight of a seemingly vacuous television series can make a deeper point. Those cases are, admittedly rare, but following Myers too closely would cut us off from those opportunities. Of course, when we consider the amount of work it takes to sift through the tares to get those few heads of wheat, he may be on to something.

It’s hard to place this book, exactly. It is one that I’d like to read with my teenagers as we think about what good music, movies, books, and art ought to do to us and for us. But it is a book that presumes that the reader has some awareness of good and bad quality and has an ability to make discerning choices. For those that are raised on the cotton candy of cartoons, super hero films, and Christian prairie romance novels, Myers’ thesis may be a hard pill to swallow. And yet, if we are to recover our love for transcendent things and our culture-making Christian character, then the Church needs to listen more carefully to people like Myers.

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes (With a New Introduction / Redesign): Christians and Popular Culture (Volume 7)

By Myers, Ken

Buy on Amazon