Christianity and Corn Flakes

Welcome to any new subscribers! In this newsletter I share a few things that I think provide a taste of truth, goodness, or beauty. Sharing something doesn't mean I agree with it, just that I think it's worth some of your attention. I love to learn from quite disparate sources, and I'm sure that will come across in what I share. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

After an unplanned summer break from creating content due to some medical emergencies in the family and other responsibilities coming to the fore, I'm excited to finally release the video I started researching back in the spring on John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg created corn flakes for theological reasons, and his missteps can teach us a lot about how to develop a properly Christian theology of food. When I started working on it I didn't expect that this video would have me addressing Goop, essential oils, Joel Osteen, and the book of Job. Check it out here.

Still, the closer one gets to recent Christian history, the more urgent it becomes to think about how Christians today are or are not applying agrarian principles, and what prophetic intervention might persuade them to change course. Wirzba argues that agrarian thought can transform the way Christians pray, the way they give, the way they hope. But the relationship runs the other way as well. Might prayer transform environmentalism? Might Christian generosity exceed climate change philanthropy? How does hope in Jesus Christ contrast with today’s apocalyptic fears? Many Christians are hypocrites, some are dedicated capitalists and destroyers of the earth, but the Christian tradition continues to hold within itself resources and the spiritual power to revive and renew, whereas agrarianism cut off from Christ will inevitably disappoint.

From a review of Norman Wirzba's recent book, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (note: Wirzba's Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating is a must-read for Hungry Theologian followers).

Many will know that the future of education is an interest of mine (more specifically, higher education, and, when I'm feeling even more specific, theological education). The liberal arts are essential to a good society, and the university has historically served as the molten core from which humane learning emanates. Yet, for a variety of reasons, the modern university system is dying. Even as old models pass away, we must ensure that the best of what they offered is preserved.

My friend Colin Redemer recently addressed this topic, and I've written a piece in response to him in which I outline the necessity of building a new kind of technological infrastructure as a foundation on which we can rebuild the university. The folks at Ad Fontes will be publishing my response soon.

Protecting Teens From Big Tech, a new policy brief from the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, outlines policy actions that states could take to curb the harmful effects of social media on teens. Read the introduction for a description of some of these harms, then check out their policy recommendations. Protecting teens is only one step that must be taken to combat the corrosive effects of big tech on our society, but it's one that should be a no-brainer.

Alastair Roberts on Ecclesiologies and Bibliologies:

A fuller consideration of this question would need to reflect upon the ways in which the word in particular naturally raises questions of mediation. As the Apostle Paul himself discussed in 2 Corinthians 10, the written word is something that plays with the realities of physical presence and absence. The written text is at once a mode of its author’s presence and a sign of their absence. Losing a sense of the presence of the word—and of the Word—in our midst through an overdependence upon certain modes of technical mediation (not least the departicularization characteristic of modern mass production, reproduction, and replication) would be serious. Yet there is perhaps something about the fact that we have scriptures, rather than a direct voice from heaven, that might invite reflection upon the peculiar nature of our situation prior to the consummation of all things. The threat posed by modern media might often be that of a false and simulated immediacy, of saturated horizons without depth, within which neither the charged presence nor absence appropriate to the mediation of the word can register.

God bless,

Ralph

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Ralph Roberts

Christianity and Corn Flakes

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