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Obres de Jake Meador

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Admittedly, the first time I read Meador's book I was mostly unimpressed and frustrated. But after returning to it for a seminary class, I found it quite good on my second reading. Perhaps it is because I have had a couple kids myself, and have witnessed an increasingly belligerent conservatism within my own tribe (Presbyterianism). What I once saw as an overreaction and a bit patronizing on the part of Meadow, I now see as possessing some merit.

Meadow does well to criticize the sacred cows of modernism: existentialism, self-actualization, and autonomy. These tear against fundamental principles of Christian discipleship: solidarity, dispossession, and the common good. The modernist's vision of community--which is no less a buzzword among pagans as it is believers today--is a false one. Christianity offers the corrective even if it is illiberal. I think Meador is strongest when he advocates for resourcement and retrieval. Christians today are not on our own. We stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us. May we heed their wisdom and counsel.

My only complaint is that Meador at times sounds like an advocate for reforming evangelicalism as a movement whereas I would prefer to abandon it altogether. I think Meador recognizes the importance of the local church, it's just his ideal sounds too much like evangelicalism albeit a federated form. I would prefer lowest common-denominator Christianity be cast aside for robust denominational distinctions. There's no reason why Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, and the like can't tease their respective theologies to their own natural conclusions on some of these matters while still extending the right hand of fellowship.
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rdhasler | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Nov 28, 2022 |
Summary: An argument for a Christian politics that recognizes the goodness of all creation including all peoples, that rejects the manipulation of people and places and our own bodies that disregards their nature.

Jake Meador begins this work with the story of Father Ted, who helped a journalist covering apartheid South Africa, escape house arrest and the country. He represents to Meador a kingdom politics committed to life for the whole of life. Meador argues that much of American Christianity divorces faith from creation, from our embodied life, and other human beings, all for our own political and economic ends.

Drawing on the work of Herman Bavinck and Willie Jennings, he describes the immense inheritance we have inherited in the creation and one another. We repudiate this in our Western disregard of both the places we inhabit, living in accord with the particular character of that place, and in our colonization, in our disregard the peoples there before us. The particular expression of our alienation from God for those in the West is the exaltation of whiteness, and the oppression of others. Our reductionist education results in a loss of wonder.

Another reformer points the way back. Martin Bucer taught that the renewal of our relationship with God in Christ renews our relationship to neighbor, to proper governance, and to the care of the land. We learn again to accept the givenness of nature and our place in it. We embrace the household, marriage, and sexuality lived within that relationship, and lives of faithfulness to one another in sickness and health. And we embrace the larger community of God’s people in a particular place. Meador upholds the model of the Bruderhof, who renounce private ownership of material possessions. He advocates for the more challenging work of being this community in one’s own city and neighborhood.

I’m wrestling with my reaction to this book. Meador has great facility for drawing together the work of various theologians, philosophers, and writers, along with some great personal stories. Yet I found the thread of this article not easy to follow, and a more prolix statement of what Wendell Berry articulates so straightforwardly in What Are People For? and other essays. But it is an important and perceptive argument. The gospel not only restores us to God but to our embodied existence, each other as families and communities, states and the world, and to God’s good earth. It is apparent that our politically and economically captive churches have not heard this enough and this message is so urgent that it cannot be spoken and written and lived enough, until we recover a sense of what Christians are for.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
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BobonBooks | May 17, 2022 |
Summary: Observing the breakdown in community in both church and society, the author traces the root causes, and the practices of Christian community that can lead to recovery of community and a church that seeks the common good in society.

Many attentive culture watchers have noted the parallel declines of both church and wider American culture. Attendance is dropping in many churches even as churches are rocked with scandals of sexual abuse and financial mismanagement. The seduction of the church to corrupt political alliances, whether of the left or the right, in the author's view, is only the final step in a church that has given itself to power instead of the doing of "small things with great love." While all this goes on, America is "bowling alone" to even a greater extend than when Robert Putnam first published his study of the decline of social capital and community in America. Suicide rates are up, life expectancy is dropping, and the professionalized care industry is booming, even as local community and a sense of cohesion and pursuit of common good is vanishing in a land of toxic discourse.

Jake Meador chronicles these parallel declines and traces them to three factors. One is a loss of meaning, a pervasive existentialism that pretends to meaning in choices of radical freedom, yet without hope. A second is a loss of wonder, a dis-enchantment with the world as the buffered self cuts us off from both danger and wonder, resulting pervasive boredom. A third is the hollowing out of work, where efficiency and profitability is the sum total of work's meaning, where we are alienated both from our work, and by our work from home, family, and religious life, as work becomes all-consuming.

Meador proposes three practices that may play a crucial role in restoring Christian communities to health, enabling them to exercise a societal presence that fosters a wider common good. He begins with the surprising proposal of keeping sabbath, as a tangible way of underscoring that human beings were made, not for work, but for God, that we are human beings, not human doings. One of the things Meador argues for is corporate worship, as one tangible way of keeping sabbath that begins to restore a sense of our being part of some "common good." He adopts Wendell Berry's idea of "membership" in which we recognize that we are embedded in both a human and wider biological community. He advocates for work that is sacramental--that work is good and offers ways to bless others, that produces wealth, and is attentive to the membership.

His final section consists of two parts. The latter grounds the former, and really all that he has written, in the new heaven and new earth, a hope that is even more real than life in the present age. The former talks about what it means for the community of God's people to be citizens in earthly societies. It is here perhaps that he makes one of his most trenchant observations:

Put another way, the political priorities of many American Christians in recent years have been precisely backward. We ought to have begun with doctrine because doctrine defines the good life as it relates to political systems and societies. Then we ought to have turned to the formation of citizens. We should have asked what kind of virtues are necessary to live well in community with one another and what particular virtues are necessary for responsible political action. Then we should have asked how to cultivate those virtues within our people. Finally, only after attending to these issues, we should have moved on to debating policy....American Christians, and evangelicals especially, have done the exact opposite. (p. 161).

He argues for a political doctrine shaped by the Kuyperian ideas of solidarity and sphere sovereignty, and the practice of subsidiarity--that government should only do those things it is large enough to do, leaving other matters to other spheres of life.

Reading Jake Meador as a sixty-something took me back to what it was like to read as a college student a young Os Guinness in The Dust of Death, with his sweeping discussion of culture, and what it meant for Christians to live as a third way. There is the same scope of considering cultural forces, the intellectual ideas behind them, and a fresh vision of what Christian faithfulness might look like in the present time. Sadly, a boomer generation fascinated with "fast-everything" circumvented doctrine and virtue and communal practices in pursuit of policy influence, power, or a personal prosperity without a sense of our membership and solidarity with others and all living things.

This leaves me reflecting. Os Guinness is still speaking and writing. Jake Meador has written for a number of publications. But who is reading? And who is heeding? I hope someone is and that the American church wakes up to how far it has declined over forty years, before all we can do is cry "Ichabod. The glory has departed!" (1 Samuel 4:21). Meador's ideas and commended practices offer light for those tired of groping in the darkness.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
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BobonBooks | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Aug 26, 2019 |
An exploration of the challenges of early 21st century Western culture.

The author does well at even-handedly investigating what has gone wrong with our culture: the loss of community, the rise of rampant individualism, the loss of value in work and effort, the commodification of everything, etc. This is not a partisan work; he finds as much at fault in modern conservatism as he does modern liberalism.

The author no doubt finds in faithful Christian living some kind of antidote to these difficulties, and a presumed path to the common good, but I found the work much lighter in terms of figuring out the way forward than it was in ascertaining how things have broken down. The author is a fan of Dreher's "Benedict Option," and much good could be done with more effective Christian catchesis. But that doesn't seem like something that's going to bring everyone in our pluralist society around to the common good, although it might well be that the author is convinced there can be no common good without communal confession of Christianity. If that's the case, then the common good was rarely, if ever, activated, and has little prayer in the future as a going concern, and is chasing after a myth...or the definition of what it might look like to find common ground in a secular society to improve the lot of everyone would need to be considered to be possible. Is it an impossibility or just beyond the imaginative purview of the author and his associates?

Nevertheless, a good read to consider the situation in which we find ourselves.

**--galley received as part of early review program
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deusvitae | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Jun 10, 2019 |

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Obres
6
Membres
152
Popularitat
#137,198
Valoració
3.2
Ressenyes
6
ISBN
8
Llengües
1

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