“One. Two. Three.” Confession: I’m a wannabe monastic. I even mowed a makeshift prayer maze into my backyard when the grass got high enough. I like to slow my days and wander through weeds; I bet my neighbor Ryman thinks I’m crazy. “Greg must be hopped up on Mountain Dew. He’s shirtless and crying in the field. Who’s he talking to anyway? Should I check on him?” Counting my steps settles me. “Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.” If I pace it right, 150 small strides complete the path. The number is an accident, but it conjures the Psalms and invites me to walk in the honesty and hope that they have paved for me. The Psalms serve as the original template for the range of emotion: welcoming us to embrace our desire to be fully known and fully accepted (Ps. 139), giving us permission to speak completely and truthfully about our disappointments and desperate needs (Ps. 88), and inspiring and imploring us to hold fast to hope for a Savior (Ps. 126). “Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.” The Book of Common Prayer, written and compiled by Thomas Cranmer in the 16th century, is a helpful tool for some of the same reasons. It was a centerpiece in the Protestant revolution in England and is still used by many denominations around the world. It sets a standard for liturgical worship and, like my well-worn trail through the grass, creates boundaries within which to explore. “Fourteen. Fifteen.” My new record accepts Cranmer’s invitation to the journey, walking his words in music. Songs of Common Prayer pairs simple, singable melodies with the Book of Common Prayer’s time-honored poetry (which is often taken from the lavish language of the Psalms). This album is a gift to the Church, whether you belong to a congregation looking to include more traditional elements into your service; a liturgical community looking for fresh, accessible song settings; or you just crave a devotional accompaniment for everyday life. I’ve introduced these songs to my church over the last year and incorporating them into our daily liturgies has been a formative adventure. “Sixteen. Seventeen.” Recording the record often felt like a sacramental party with mugs of cinnamon tea and plates of brownies next to candles and incense–prayers, poetry, toasts, and laughter. We sought, through shared vulnerability and contemplation, to create something comforting and helpful. In the end, when I hear the album, it moves me toward the sacred, communal, and celebratory spirit in which it was created. “Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.” The first single from the record is called “Mystery of Faith.” I knew when I wrote it that I wanted Sarah Masen to sing it with me. Her presence is palpable, offering healing like a mother’s cool hand on a feverish head. The song emphasizes the liturgical words, “We have died together. We will rise together. We will live together.” It declares that life is severely painful and that there is reason to hope. Died together. “Twenty-two.” Rise together. “Twenty-three.” Live together. “Twenty-four.” The song goes on. “We are brothers and sisters through our Savior’s blood.” When we sing this song at church, I see real people singing with me—seven-year-old Samuel and retired Ron, Nyk cradling Cosette facedown like a football, Caroline quietly serving in the back, Morgan, Emily, Andrew, Tommy. I’m reminded that it is not only Christ who who has been crucified, resurrected, and who joins me, but a roomful of friends, a city of believers, and a cloud of witnesses from across the ages. Together. “Twenty-five.” Together. “Twenty-six.” Together. “Twenty-seven.” As we walk the winding roads of life—perilous and full of wonder—may we slow down and open our hands to receive and accept reality, open our hearts to trust and worship God, and open our eyes to our brothers and sisters beside, behind, and before us. Hand in hand and with a single voice, let us put one foot in front of the other and sing ourselves onward as we march through mystery. I’m not even close to the end of my journey and I have no idea where I am going, but I do know that I’m not alone. So, for those traveling this same road, I hope that Songs of Common Prayer will feel like an invitation into the tall grass: a place where you can go at your own pace and ask your own questions. I pray that you will find truth and comfort and discover hope when it’s all that keeps you moving. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three…” Greg LaFollette is a musician and producer in Nashville, TN. He is the resident artist at a local church plant, Grace Story Church, and serves as their director of arts and liturgy. You can follow Greg at his website to hear the new single “Mystery of Faith” and get the full-length album Songs of Common Prayer on October 26th.

Welcome to Week 3 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at Chapters 6-8, which call us to consider God’s good gifts of culture and the ways in which He continues to invite us into His creative work. What does the creation story in Genesis tell us about the nature of creation? What does all this mean for us as creators and cultivators? Join us in the comments section or in the forum with your thoughts. In the beginning, before there were names for anything, there was chaos. Apsu (freshwater) and Tiamat (salt sea) mingled and begat children, gods. The gods begat other gods. These gods rebelled; Marduk, chief among them, clove Tiamat in two and her corpse became the sky and the earth. When the younger gods tired of menial service, they begged for a race of slaves to wait upon them. In answer, humans were made to do the gods’ bidding and build their temples. The gods warred, humans served. Chaos. But this is not the God we know. This is not the God in whose image we are created, in whose likeness we also create. No, our God hovered over the waters—salt and fresh. Our God tamed the chaos, ordered it and filled it with life. Our God created the dry land not by tearing asunder but by drawing together. He planted a garden. He made our first parents not to serve Him, but to serve the ground, to work alongside Him to tend the garden, to make of the whole world a garden. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It was formless and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Holy Spirit of God hovered over the waters to bring order out of chaos. Who are Apsu and Tiamat of Babylonian legend? They are nothing, unnamed in the Hebrew narrative. Not gods. At most they are sea monsters, created by the one true God. Nowhere in all of ancient mythology has any other deity given away authority like this. No god but ours has ever given us His own nature. No god but ours has ever invited us to create. Laure Hittle Who is our God? The one who made heaven and earth, who ordered it and filled it, who made us in His likeness and called us good, who exalted us to a place of co-laboring with Him, who submitted to Adam the authority to name the creatures. And in ancient cosmology, nothing exists without a name and a function. In one sense, Adam created the zebra, the howler monkey, the toucan, the moth. God was their origin; He invented their being from formless emptiness, by a word. And then with a word He gave authority to humankind, who, with a word, told these creatures who they were. “Whatever the man called the creature, that was its name.” Nowhere in all of ancient mythology has any other deity given away authority like this. No god but ours has ever given us His own nature. No god but ours has ever invited us to create. *** Who are we? Where did we come from? How did the world get this way? These are questions that all humans wrestle with. Archaeology, as Crouch says, cannot tell us what makes humans distinctive, or when and how that happened (119). But we need to make meaning of the world. We need to make sense of our place in it, and of the powerful forces which we cannot control. Like us, ancient Israel dwelled amidst a wider culture with widely varying beliefs. They had been powerless cogs in the great machine of Egypt and now sat at the crossroads of the known world. They were familiar with Egyptian wisdom literature, with the mythologies of the surrounding nations, with the household gods inherited from Ur and Canaan. They had learned to condemn and critique—and to copy and consume. The writer of Genesis wrote with this backdrop, and in a deeply literary and slyly subversive manner he took those old tropes, those motifs of darkness and chaos and humankind’s place in the cosmos, and made them to serve the One God. By both word and silence, the writer of Genesis deftly unmakes Babylonian cosmology, dethroning Marduk and exalting the One God, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Laure Hittle The writer describes God dividing the spheres of the world into inhabitable planes, and then filling them with life. Light from darkness: Days. Water above from water below: Sky. Waters from waters below: Sea and land. And then, the explosion of life: Luminaries, creeping creepers, animals, humans. Luminaries? Yes, luminaries. For this writer, the sun, the moon, and all the stars are no deities, dictating men’s and women’s fates. They serve us and mark the seasons. They govern the day and the night, but not us. And again, they are not even named. There can be no mistaking what lights the author means, but he will not give them names which to the surrounding culture indicate personhood and power. He means to ascribe all glory to God. And he does this with a subtlety that is so easy to miss if we lack the cultural language to hear it, and so hard to miss if we grew up hearing stories of Apsu, Tiamat, Marduk, and the sun and moon in their glory. By both word and silence, the writer of Genesis deftly unmakes Babylonian cosmology, dethroning Marduk and exalting the One God, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Perhaps what I love the most about this writer’s work is that unlike Babylon’s creation myth, the Enuma Elish, Genesis was not written in poetry. And yet, the Biblical creation account is not written in prose either. It is a challenging and exhilarating melding of prose and poetry that exists nowhere else in scripture. It may be that the writer of Genesis, seeking both to tell a true account and a beautiful one, started with prose in mind and took flights along the way. But in my mind, he saw that the old art forms could not contain the grandeur of God’s creative work any more than the highest heavens could contain Him, and he set out to mimic his creator—to not only set down the facts in an orderly fashion, but to extravagantly create a new art form along the way. *** Did something stand out to you in this week’s reading? Share it in the comments. You’ll find more discussion questions and opportunity for reflection in the Rabbit Room forum. And if you’re new to this reading group, click here for the first post in this series.

I deleted Instagram from my phone earlier this summer. A few months before that I did the same with the Facebook app. Our family went on a pretty big adventure for a few weeks, and more than once my instinct was to share a photo of it on social media, but when I realized the app wasn’t on my phone I felt a flash of frustration followed by a sigh of relief—then I moved on, happy to be fully present where I was, when I was, how I was with those I love most. Part of the reason I dropped the apps from my phone was that the previous year had been so packed with stuff I needed to tell people about: the Wingfeather film and Kickstarter campaign, the Rich Mullins show at the Ryman, the Christmas tour, the Resurrection Letters release and tour. It would have been irresponsible of me to refuse to share that stuff online because other people (the label, management, concert promoters, etc.) were counting on it. If nobody knows about these things, nobody shows up; if nobody shows up, the people investing time and money in them don’t get paid; if that happens, the next time we try and put something into the world, I won’t have much help. Like it or not, we look to social media for news about what matters to us. It would be silly not to take advantage of it. In fact, twenty five years ago when I started doing this music thing, I remember feeling frustrated that there wasn’t an easier way to let people know what I was up to—or on the other side of the coin, I was frustrated when I only found out after the fact that an artist I loved had been in town. Not long after that, when our community of songwriters banded together as the Square Peg Alliance, we talked about how sad it was that we couldn’t afford to make records without a label or a benefactor. “If only there was a platform that would allow our small but wonderful fanbase to help us pay for the project,” we lamented. Enter Kickstarter, which changed the game for many of us. These are good things. But here’s the problem: now social media asks more from me than I’m able to give. And if I play by its rules, it becomes a spiritual issue. Here’s what I mean. Our family adventure this summer was a time of reconnection and retreat for Team Peterson. We were tired, worn down by school and work, by more-intense-than-usual creative demands (which always brings with it an increase in travel, which always brings an increase in weariness and stress). Don’t get me wrong—I love my job. Truly. I couldn’t be more grateful that the Lord has allowed me to serve him in this way. But in my old age I’ve gotten more and more private with personal stuff, and have felt more conviction about what’s appropriate to share on social media. Not only does it snap me out of the moment I’m in, as if it’s not enough to be in a beautiful place with my family unless I show everyone else where we are, it also leads to envy. Some people actually write “envious” or “jealous” in the comments. I know, because I’ve done it myself. We all know about the tendency on social media to make our lives look like they’re better than they really are. I’ve considered seeing what would happen if I posted a picture of myself with bloodshot eyes after a tearful argument, or a quick video clip of me grumbling about something that didn’t go right, or (the horror!) me with my shirt off to show why I’m trying to get more exercise. That’s not to mention the hellish tendency to put too much stake in how many likes or follows we got today. Comparison is the thief of joy, said Teddy Roosevelt, and social media is foundationally comparative. It’s comparison on steroids. Social media asks more of me than I'm able to give. Andrew Peterson Here’s the rub: I’m a touring songwriter and author. The way I pay my bills is, in a very real sense, tied to social media. It’s not a stretch to imagine that in the board meeting where a publisher or label is discussing whether or not to offer someone a deal, the amount of followers one has on Facebook or Instagram actually matters. More followers equals more influence and advertising, equals more sales, equals more profit, equals a contract and the possibility of putting something good and helpful into the world. As a member of the Rabbit Room board I can attest to the fact that an organization needs income in order to survive. If we didn’t have help from our Rabbit Room members (thank you for joining by clicking here, seriously), and if this amazing community didn’t actually support our artists and authors by purchasing products, the Rabbit Room would fizzle and go away. Social media is often how you guys find out about this stuff. Even if the Rabbit Room were just a website, we’d need to pay someone for hosting, design, and maintenance, not to mention content. Commerce isn’t an evil, however evil commerce can become if it isn’t done with righteousness. Okay, so social media is, in this day and age, a necessary component of an artist’s career. Why not just post tour dates and album releases? Because, the social media gods tells us, people will stop listening to you if there’s no personal connection, no ongoing interaction, or if there’s only sporadic activity. People will start to think you’re greedy or self-serving if the only time you post on Instagram is when you want them to buy your books or albums. And, sadly, there’s some truth to that. We already get enough advertisements from everything else in the world—why would we bother to follow an artist just to get more ads? But isn’t there something icky about sharing intimate moments of my family’s summer vacation when even a fraction of my motive is to build up enough trust to tell you about my new record when the time comes? The answer is YES. It’s more than icky. And that’s when social media demands more than I’m willing to give. My heart is at stake. Yours is, too. You, friends, are not commodities. You are not merely means to an end. You are not mere vehicles for commerce. You are vast souls, invaluable and intricate. The murmur of the Holy Spirit in my heart has grown over the years into a clear voice: don’t thoughtlessly share pictures of yourself or your loved ones with people you don’t really know. Don’t play a game that inevitably leads to envy or dissatisfaction, for you or anyone else. Don’t manipulate children of God for your own purposes. Don’t compare your own gifts to what God has given to others. Be content with what you have. Pay attention to where you are. Be present. What I’m describing, of course, is a worst-case scenario. I’m not at all implying that everyone on social media has the same conflict I do. Indeed, most of the time I’ve posted stuff online that wasn’t directly career-related was done so for fun, or because it really can be helpful, even joyful, to share our lives with each other. But we’re all flawed. Our hearts aren’t impervious to this temptation. Mine isn’t, at least. The murmur of the Holy Spirit in my heart has grown over the years into a clear voice: don't thoughtlessly share pictures of yourself or your loved ones with people you don't really know. Don't play a game that inevitably leads to envy or dissatisfaction, for you or anyone else. Andrew Peterson That leads me to where I am now, which feels like an impasse. How do I reconcile all this with the fact that I’ve come to know some of you well because of interactions on social media? How can I discount the massive encouragement I’ve received from some of you via Facebook or Instagram? How do I deny the fact that I have been blessed and shaped by albums and books and films and concerts and articles I wouldn’t have discovered any other way? How do I maintain a healthy relationship with people who actually do care about me and mine, who actually want to know what’s going on in my life, though I’ve never once had dinner or coffee with them? This culture is so weird, right? It’s weird in ways no one could have predicted when the first computer was constructed. I don’t know the answers to these questions. It would be arrogant for me to assume you’ve noticed that I’ve been more absent than usual from social media, but if you have, it’s not your imagination. I’m fighting my way through this just like you are. But while I’ve been “gone,” I’ve actually been more “here” than I have in a long time. I’ve harvested this year’s honey, laughed with my family, watched some great movies, and read several great books. I’ve seen beautiful things and thanked God for them with a lessening impulse to grab my phone to tell everyone else about it. I’ve become more aware than ever of my broken need for approval and my habit to envy. Life was rich long before social media showed up, and it’s been nice to remember that. And yet, I really do want to share things with my friends and acquaintances and even those I don’t yet know. How can you see a beautiful tree and not want to say, “Isn’t that something?” I guess I’m saying I don’t yet know how to navigate these waters. For now, at least, here are a couple of principles I’m trying to abide by: 1. Don’t post about myself unless I have to. Use social media to draw attention to other people’s work more than my own. If we all agreed to this, we could avoid the icky stuff and just as many people would know what we’re making. 2. Keep it off my phone. I don’t miss the Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook apps. Nowadays I post stuff from my computer. That way it’s a bit more trouble to share things, and I’m not tempted to do it in the moment. We all know there are better ways to spend our time at traffic lights and airport terminals than thumbing our way through a zillion pictures and memes. 3. Don’t post anything that might cause my brothers and sisters to stumble. If I’m posting something that is meant, even a little bit, to make my life look awesome, then I shouldn’t. Yes, our lives are full of beauty and goodness and delightful moments. No, I’m not meant to construct a false world for others to see or, worse, to boast. This one is really tricky, because it’s actually wonderful to be able to share good news and gratitude. Pray for discernment. Listen to the Spirit. 4. Be present. After our vacation I found some fun pictures and posted them, then I moved on. No offense, but when I was with my family, I didn’t want to be with the rest of Facebook. It reminds me of something Wendell Berry said about poetry: “You can’t think about the fact that you’re writing a poem. As soon as that thought shows up, you’ve stopped writing a poem. You’re doing something else.” In that spirit, I’d say this: “When you’re experiencing something beautiful, you can’t stop and take a picture of it to share with everybody else. As soon as that happens, you’re not experiencing something beautiful. You’re doing something else.” I’d love to hear how you’re wrestling with these things. I don’t pretend to have the answers, and I’m sure I’ll post stuff online that’ll make you roll your eyes and say, “Oh, Mr. I-Hate-Instagram doesn’t have a hard time now, does he?” All I know is, it’s been nice not fussing with it for the last few months. On the other hand, maybe it’s just part of the culture now and the answer is to find a way to redeem it. In the meantime I want to keep wrestling the giant. I’ll let you know how it goes. Probably on Facebook.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

When I was a boy, I read a comic book about which I remember only one scene: the protagonists are being menaced by a bad guy with a gun. They get backed into a corner (literally, if memory serves, not figuratively), and just when it is obvious that there is no way they could possibly escape, the bad guy bursts into flames right before their eyes. One protagonist turns to the other and says, “Spontaneous human combustion: what a stroke of luck!” This is an extreme case of a storytelling offense known as deus ex machina—literally, the god out of the machinery. The term derives from the Roman theater; as Roman theatergoers’ appetite grew for novelty and plot twists (not to mention mistaken identities and twins separated at birth), the plots of Roman plays grew increasingly complex. In fact, they sometimes grew so convoluted that the playwrights gave up on actually resolving the complications in a narratively believable way. Instead, they would write a scene in which a god would appear and resolve all the characters’ problems with the wave of a wand. That way, everybody could get home at a reasonable hour. The actor playing the god would often be lowered on a rope from machinery installed in the rafters for this purpose. Hence the phrase, the god out of the machinery, deus ex machina. While many of us believe that there actually is a God who is fully able to reach out of the machinery of the universe to resolve problems of human making—a God who often does just that (and, indeed, who made the machinery)—few of us are interested in stories in which a human writer invents problems which he then resolves by inventing a divine intervention, or a happy coincidence or a timely case of spontaneous human combustion. The deus ex machina highlights a tension that exists in almost all storytelling, both fiction and non-fiction. When we tell stories, we are balancing goals that are often at odds with one another. On the one hand, the storyteller is always trying to depict events that feel true to the way things actually happen in the world God made. On the other hand, the writer has other goals as well: he wants to communicate information that the reader needs to know in order to make sense of the story—information about characters and their relations to one another, information about setting, perhaps information about events that have led up to the events of the story at hand. He wants to create tension, then resolve that tension. It isn’t always easy to harmonize these goals with the goal of writing stories that feel true to real life. The deus ex machina is one of the more spectacular failures to harmonize these goals. But there are lots of ways to get this wrong. No doubt you’ve read dialogue in which the characters seem to be talking to the audience rather than to one another. Cindy, I’ve been your stepmother for ten years now, and I love you almost as much as I love my natural-born children—Paul, age 20, and Baby Brittany, your half-sister and the apple of your father’s eye. But I don’t think you have ever made me this angry before…except possibly the time you refused to be the flower girl at my wedding to your father. It is always a problem when the writer’s motives are easier to understand than the characters’ motives. A few weeks ago, one of my online students submitted a (non-fiction) story in which two co-workers have a conversation that gives the reader everything she needs to know about the two characters’ relationship, teeing up the surprising gesture that is the climax of the story. The only problem was that the characters’ dialogue was just a little too informative. I told the writer that the dialogue seemed packaged. (I might have said that the dialogue seemed like something written rather than something two people would say to one another in the world God made.) The writer wrote back, You’re right that the story is ‘packaged’ in the sense that I chose to combine elements of different conversations and events that happened at different times into a single narrative; I was attempting to use those to establish the nature of the characters’ relationships with each other, to give some context in which to understand the gesture at the end. But the events and conversations described really happened: they really said (more or less) those words. Let me say two things in this writer’s defense. First, it is the writer’s prerogative to compress events and combine bits of different conversations into a single conversation, as long as he is not making any claims to reportorial accuracy (which this writer wasn’t). And second, “to establish the nature of the characters’ relationships with each other” and “to give some context in which to understand the gesture at the end” are both perfectly legitimate goals. Having said that, I think it is dangerous for a writer to prioritize any goal over the goal of depicting a scene that feels like something that could happen in the world in which we live and move and have our being. Compressing events and combining conversations are fine as long as as the end result is a scene that feels like real life. Establishing characters’ relationships and providing context are legitimate goals, but if you don’t achieve the goal of writing scenes that could have happened in the world God made, you can’t achieve any other goals in your storytelling. As Flannery O’Connor said, do whatever you can get away with…but nobody ever got away with much. If you enjoyed Jonathan’s excellent advice and are interested in more, you can sign up for Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here.

I’m a slow reader, and it’s rare that a writer comes along with a voice so captivating that I can’t stop reading. I finished this one in less than 24 hours (a real feat for me), and I’m just about to slip it onto my shelf of favorites right in between what I consider its spiritual forebears: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb. Courage, Dear Heart is presented as a series of nine letters written to those in the midst of abuse, disillusionment, doubt, and pain. And this format gives Reynolds leeway to engage her substantial powers of empathy. Such intimate powers coupled with her gift of language come together to create a work of incredible insight, beauty, thought, and grace. And those qualities are dearly needed because on every page she grapples with monumental powers of darkness. She’s forging for the wounded of the world a shield against the problem of evil, the spiral of loneliness, the cataract of suffering, and the temptation of doubt. The book is nothing less than a battlement erected against the enemy’s advance into our homes and hearts. Yet it’s not an apologetic. It’s an act of love. I’ve always known Rebecca Reynolds had a book in her. She’s one of the best writers I know, and also one of the best thinkers, and one of the most caring people. I know these things because over the years I’ve butted heads with her from time to time and I’ve always ended up wiser for the bruises, no matter who came out on top. And I also know this book cost her a lot to write. Maybe that’s part of what makes it so good. After all, a book or a painting or a poem that doesn’t cost the artist much, doesn’t ask much of its audience. But Courage, Dear Heart, asks a great deal. It asks us to pay attention, not to the writer, but to her Source. It asks us to let ourselves open up and be loved by a writer and her gifts in a way that may make us uncomfortable at times, but will not leave us alone in the dark. It asks us to follow its pages through darkness and pain in search of the bright dawn of hope. As the book wound down to its final page, I found myself enjoying the kind of breathless wonder that only a few other books have given me—books like Godric, or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or The Supper of the Lamb, or A Severe Mercy. And this is how a great writer best loves her reader: the wonder she stirs in us is less about the written work, and more about the right and true things toward which her gifts leave us oriented. Until I cracked it open, I didn’t know I needed this book. But I did. Read it and then give a copy to someone you know. They need it, too. We all do. [Courage, Dear Heart: Letters to a Weary World is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

Welcome to Week 2 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group – Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at Chapters 3-5. A couple weeks ago while preparing for this read-through of Culture Making, I posed two questions on the RR Forum: “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘culture’? And what was your relationship to culture when you were growing up?” The answers weren’t surprising… “Growing up, I think I associated ‘culture’ with the idea of culture wars. The ‘culture’ was a worldly, ungodly place that I needed to stay away from. Then I think I moved to a different kind of aggressive stance, where I thought Christian culture needed to overcome secular culture…” – Chris (@chrisyokel) “In a church context – it’s almost always put forward as an ‘us vs. them’ scenario, such as ‘….our culture is telling us [option A], but God/the Bible [option B].’ I think it’s often used as a stand-in word for behaviors that are socially accepted in the US but miiight not be biblically orthodox.” – @Laura “Growing up in the church and heavy into the early phases of ‘Christian rock,’ I saw culture as something to be imitated but with a Christian twist, not unlike what we are now seeing in the film industry… ‘culture’ has what people want, so let’s make it wholesome or biblical or Gospel oriented. The idea that believers are to be culture makers was completely foreign.” – Beth (@bethelrising) If you’re a regular at the Rabbit Room and willing to pick up a Christian book on Culture Making, I’d guess a few things are true about you. For one thing, you are probably a Christian with some solid ideas about theology and culture. However you got here—growing up in church, becoming a Christian later in life, or in the middle of a faith shift, questioning and finding your way—here you are. I suppose it’s even safe to guess the majority of us are smack in the middle of white American evangelicalism. (And if you aren’t part of that tradition, please comment away… we need your perspective!) For better or worse, my guess is at least one part of those stories above rings true for you. I know it did for me. What Chris, Laura, and Beth describe in their comments are certainly definitions of culture, but they also suggest something about the postures we take in how we respond to culture. In Chapter 5, Crouch gives us a history of Christians and culture, characterizing different times and groups with different postures: Condemning: Fundamentalism (withdrawing and ignoring, all fear and no delight) Critiquing: The Neo-Evanglicals (think Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri… asking question about worldview, “somewhere between beating the world and joining it”) Copying: The CCM / Jesus Movement (welcoming and appropriating cultural forms, but becoming puritanical about content and splitting sacred and secular) Consuming: Just taking it all in Like the way our bodies’ postures communicate confidence or shame, energy or withdrawal, our posture toward culture says something about what we believe is possible. And, as Crouch points out, good posture gives you freedom to move. Our posture makes some movements more possible than others. If our attitude toward movies is “that’s all a bunch of immoral liberal trash,” then it’s impossible to experience the redemptive power of great films. But if we read books with a critiquing posture, it’s possible to find God between the lines of both great classics and a contemporary sci-fi paperback. If our posture is copying, then it becomes possible to enjoy music that sounds reasonably close to whatever is popular without feeling gross about it (this was me in high school with my WOW CDs). And if our posture is consuming, then well… it’s possible to binge-watch anything on Netflix that strikes our fancy because who cares? It’s just entertainment, right? This week, let’s talk about the postures we’ve been taught to hold and the ones we carry today. Maybe over the years, you’ve built up a posture that’s constantly squinting at the world, looking for the glow of the holy, or maybe your arms are open wide, free from fear but not really questioning what you take in. Take some time to honestly consider how you approach the world, and ask yourself what you might learn if you saw through a different lens. A final word on these four postures: all of them have their place. Some cultural artifacts are worth condemning because they are damaging, dehumanizing—pornography for sure comes to mind. Many deserve our critique, because there’s more to them than just the surface. Sometimes it’s good to copy, as a way of learning from and paying respect to those who have gone before. And you know what? Sometimes a sandwich is a sandwich and we should just consume it. These postures, rightly ordered, can give us the freedom of movement to take on a new, more generative posture toward the culture we find ourselves in: “If there is a constructive way forward for Christians in the midst of our broken but also beautiful cultures, it will require us to recover these two biblical postures of cultivation and creation. And that recovery will involve revisiting the biblical story itself, where we discover that God is more intimately and eternally concerned with culture than we have yet come to believe.” (pg. 98) Did something stand out to you in this weeks’ reading? Feel free to share your favorite quotes, insights, and questions in the comments! You’ll find more questions for discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum. And if you’re new to this reading group, click here for the first post in this series.

In case you haven’t heard, A. S. Peterson (aka Pete Peterson) has written an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein for the stage. In Pete’s own words, “this is not your mama’s Frankenstein.” Show up to the play and you’ll find an eloquent Monster, theological questions of creation and death just as abounding as questions of scientific progress, and a Victor Frankenstein indelibly shaped by the drama of his family. I recently had the great pleasure of visiting Studio Tenn’s second read-through of Pete’s play adaptation—his own tenth draft—and I was blindsided by the depth and beauty of the story, the characters, and the symbolism woven gently into every moment of the play. What follows is the second and final part of an interview with A. S. Peterson—in it, we talk about the transition from novel-writing to playwriting, the hidden treasures within the covers of Frankenstein, the endangered art of theater, and much more. Enjoy! Click here to read Part I of our interview. Show dates begin August 31st and run through September 9th. You can buy tickets here. Drew: I noticed the Monster has a cadence reserved only for himself—when he opens his mouth, it feels more poetic than other characters. And of course that’s unexpected when we’re used to thinking of the Monster as this groaning beast of a creature. Pete: In the book, Victor warns people about the Monster: “Be careful; it is eloquent and it lies.” So while we imagine the Monster to be this course, vulgar brute, nothing could be further from the truth—I mean, the Monster learns how to speak by reading Paradise Lost! So he immediately possesses both a fluency of the English language and a rich theological framework through which to reflect on his existence. It was a lot of fun to inhabit that voice as the writer. A lot of his lines are iambic; I purposefully kept that cadence in there. Drew: Tell me a little bit about the process of making a play, from start to finish. Pete: The theater company, Studio Tenn, commissioned the play. And when I wrote my first play, I thought it would basically be like writing a novel, except that people would speak it out loud. I was sorely mistaken! Not only is it spoken out loud, but it takes place in three dimensions, it’s not performed the way you hear it in your head, it involves a whole community of people, it has to be between 90 and 120 minutes long in the form of a two-act structure—it’s a very different art form. That’s scary and exhilarating to me, because I believe art functions best from within limitations. So for someone to come up to me and say, “hey, I want you to tell this story. Here are your limitations,” I get excited about how to make that happen. I go to work and write a couple drafts. My long-suffering wife Jennifer is the first audience; we’ll sit at the kitchen table and read the whole thing out loud, doing the voices the best we can. The reality of a play is that you don’t know what’s wrong with it and what’s right with it until you hear it read aloud. So I’m deeply grateful she’s been willing to endure that with me. After a few drafts, I’ll arrive at something I’m comfortable enough with to send to the director. At that point, what I’ve sent feels like a mostly final draft to me. The director will then schedule a reading with a handful of actors where we’ll all sit down and give it our first pass, and that’s when we inevitably discover the play is nowhere near done! The first reading we did a couple months ago was entirely different from what it is now. Every time we read it out loud, I go back to the drawing board and start rewriting. We’re on draft eleven or twelve now, and we’re about to go into a workshop for the show, which means we’ll read it together, then edit it, then read it again until it settles into its final form. I appreciate the constant collaboration of playwriting—novel writing is a solitary act, but with playwriting, you’re in dialogue with all kinds of different perspectives. And I’ve been blessed to work with an amazing team of people at Studio Tenn. I trust them, I admire their sense of storytelling, and when they disagree with me I know it’s for good reason. Drew: Do you ever feel like a play is truly finished? Pete: No—like with anything, you get to a point where you have to abandon it. Books are the same way. With The Battle of Franklin, we were making tweaks to it right up until the day it opened. And even during the performances we made slight changes. The second year we did that play, we gave it another edit, cut some scenes, and so on. If we do it a third time, we’ll probably do all that over again. And that’s the unique thing with theater—it’s never the same way twice. That’s part of its gift. It’s a very living art form. Drew: What does theater have to tell us about art and spirituality? What can we learn from theater as an art form about the way God made the world? Pete: Oh man. This is one of my favorite topics. The transience of theater does not bode well in a culture of instant gratification. A. S. Peterson Drew: Here in Nashville, we give music a lot of attention, but I rarely hear conversations of this nature about theater. Pete: Yeah, it’s frustrating to me that theater is so removed from many people’s radars. There are reasons for that. Not only is it expensive, but it’s impermanent. The Avengers has been in movie theaters now for a few weeks; there’s no pressing need for me to go see it. And even when it’s gone, it will show up on Netflix, whose entire business model is to render movies ubiquitous. On the other hand, live plays will only be performed for two weeks. And if you’re busy those two weeks, or if you only just heard of the play by the time it’s closing, you’re out of luck. It’s a difficult art form to stay engaged with unless you’re very intentional about it. The transience of theater does not bode well in a culture of instant gratification. But man, I love theater. I love that there’s a parallel between theater and the Incarnation of Christ. In the Old Testament we were given the law by God; it was written and we were told to follow it. Then when we get to the New Testament and God is incarnated in the person of Jesus, it’s as if the law stood up and said, “Here’s what I look like in three dimensions.” That’s how theater is. As a writer, when I write something, I think I know all there is to know about it. But when I give it to the theater company and it stands up and becomes three-dimensional, it does things I didn’t expect. It looks different than I thought it would look. It takes on a whole new layer of meaning. I’m fascinated to think about that in context of the actual Incarnation. What was it like for the apostles to see the actual Word of God walk around in the flesh? They knew God in a way no one has ever known him, before or after. And we have their testament now in written form, but we still can’t understand it in the same way they did. We will one day—that’s our great hope. Drew: It’s as if in a certain sense, by virtue of having been born after Jesus, the play is closed to us. We missed it in live action. Pete: All you can do is read the reviews. Drew: Right! Exactly. Pete: There are some great reviews out there. Drew: Lots of them. Pete: But the revival is coming. Drew: Here’s a thought: the idea of art imitating life is a generally helpful notion, but would you say that theater has an especially privileged role in imitating life? It is the most direct imitation there is, isn’t it? When you see an actor start weeping, or being beaten on stage, it has a much more immediate effect on you than if you were to see the same things taking place on a movie screen. It's inescapable—you feel complicit in whatever is happening on stage because you're in the room with these people. A. S. Peterson Pete: It is and it isn’t. Lots of people think about theater as essentially a live movie, but there’s very little real comparison between cinema and theater. Cinema is not just filmed theater, and theater is not merely acted out cinema. What I mean is that when you go to a movie, you can sit in front of the sixty-foot movie screen, watch the story unfold, and remain distanced from it. When you go to the theater, you have an easy time knowing it’s fake—set pieces generally serve the purpose not of replicating real life objects, but of referencing them loosely— Drew: Wow. So in some ways theater is more abstract and distinct from actual life than cinema. Pete: It’s very abstract in one sense. But then when you see an actor start weeping, or being beaten on stage, it has a much more immediate effect on you than if you were to see the same things taking place on a movie screen. It’s inescapable—you feel complicit in whatever is happening on stage because you’re in the room with these people. Drew: I know there’s a lot of discussion around the issue of becoming desensitized to violence in movies—do you think there’s a chance for us as a culture to be resensitized to life through theater? Pete: The Battle of Franklin is about the bloodiest battle in the Civil War. We depicted no violence in the show, but people had visceral reactions to it. What makes it hard to watch at certain points is the sense of violence you’re experiencing. You hear fists beating on wooden doors, people screaming, gunshot sounds, none of which are coming from the safety of speakers. It’s right in front of you in a way entirely unique to theater. If you’re interested in reading Part I of our interview, you can do that by clicking here. Frankenstein will be performed at Jamison Theater in The Factory at Franklin, August 31st—September 9th and tickets are now on sale. Click here to purchase tickets.

Two scenes stand out in memory: one a place of beginning, the other a place of understanding. In the first, a nineteen-year-old girl sits alone in her car on a summer afternoon, while the boy she loved walks away. She is hurting, and the feeling of rejection is intolerable. She is disgusted with herself, so she uses her pain as a catalyst for change—she will finally take control of her health. In the fall, she begins her junior year of college, returning to the dorm with tennis shoes, supplements, and a juicer, which she props on the corner of the bathroom counter. In the mornings, before class, she gets up silently, doing Tae Bo videos while her roommate sleeps, or slipping out for a brisk walk around Lake Hollingsworth. She feeds carrots and apples and peppers and lemons and parsley into the juicer, and cleans up the mess, and she uses every spare minute to research ways to reclaim her health, to look like all those taut education majors lounging at the pool by 11 a.m. She never does look like those girls, by the way, but she turns a pitying eye on others who lack the willpower or the information to radically change their lives. She is all in. She is fully invested. She seeks out new practitioners and reads up on theories of health and healing. She does not try a supplement or a cleanse or a new methodology for a week or two and give up. Oh, no. She grits her teeth and gives it six months, a year. She is troubled, though, and increasingly so as time passes. There are people who eat what they want, drink what they want, whose bodies look as if the Greeks have carved them from marble. She can’t make sense of it. Meanwhile, she faces serious health challenges (both internal and cosmetic) that show no sign of improvement. Doctor after doctor shakes his head in dismissal. They have no answers. In the midst of all this, she meets a guy and falls in love. Loving him and being loved by him, seeing her life laid out before her like a fairy tale, makes her feel like a goddess. She is invulnerable, immortal, undeniably beautiful. She has the power to lose so much weight in the days leading up to her wedding, that the seamstress does an emergency fitting to keep the dress from falling off. Then she returns from her honeymoon to a new city, a new church, a new house, a new job, and the reality of married life, conflict, and financial struggle. Depression sets in. Her superpowers vanish. There follow seasons of struggle, of failing to live up to the standards she sets for herself, and seasons of searching for answers. There are brief periods of triumph, when the strength of her resolve sets her back above the masses. People come to her for advice, and she begins to shy away from their questions. She is learning that she cannot heal them. Then comes pregnancy, and the host of both sensible and irrational fears that accompany the arrival of a new human child. She labors over pre-natal vitamin choices, and decisions about the baby’s environment, diet, schedule, sleep, and safety. Yet her child gets sick. He catches colds and cries and develops rashes, and another baby comes along to prove that no amount of information or willpower can guarantee the perfect health of her children. Daily, we feel the infinite tiny losses that will culminate in one great loss. And we pray for healing and we search for answers, but even if we find them, they are fleeting. The Law of Sin and Death is too much like the second law of thermodynamics. Helena Sorensen This is where the second scene opens. The woman stands in the chiropractor’s office, watching a documentary on a mounted television screen. Around her, the walls are plastered with motivational quotes and flyers about upcoming seminars: ways to improve heart health, strengthen the immune system, drop twenty pounds. On the screen, the experts are weighing in, declaring that animal products cause inflammation and all manner of evil. The woman flinches, startled by the sudden break in the soundtrack of the last eighteen years. “Wait,” she says. “Haven’t they been saying for ages that grains were the problem? I thought it was bread that caused inflammation and weight gain and all manner of evil.” And it hits her with stunning clarity: they don’t have the answers. They’re trying to beat an unbeatable law. They’re trying to beat the Law of Sin and Death. All of them—the doctors, the naturopaths, the herbalists, the personal trainers—all the experts, and all of us who listen, all of us living in a world where your eczema medication can give you leukemia—we’re all trying to beat the law of sin and death. It was a revelation two decades in the making. When Adam sinned, he set himself under a new system of power and authority. Separation from God, from Life, placed him automatically under the jurisdiction of death. We who are his children have inherited that judgment. The cells of our bodies die and are renewed, and as time passes, the dying outpaces the renewing. Our strength goes, our clarity of mind goes, our vitality fades. Daily, we feel the infinite tiny losses that will culminate in one great loss. And we pray for healing and we search for answers, but even if we find them, they are fleeting. The Law of Sin and Death is too much like the second law of thermodynamics. This body is wearing out. Though I push it to its limits, eventually it will fail me, and I am more vulnerable, more fallible than a nineteen-year-old girl could have thought possible. I cannot overcome the law that governs the galaxies. One hope remains. I can submit myself to a higher law. That’s it. It’s so simple, but I had to exhaust myself completely before I could see it. All along, I’ve had access to a different way of living and thinking, because “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” (Rom. 8:2) My only hope is to place myself in the hands of the One who conquered sin and death. I cast myself at the feet of a man who entered a culture of rigid adherence to dietary restrictions and yet told his disciples, “Eat whatever is offered to you and heal the sick.” (Luke 10:8,9) I still don’t understand it. I can’t explain why some people abuse their bodies and live long, robust lives while others act with wisdom and caution and die young. I don’t know why medications help some and essential oils help others. I don’t know why some of us live on vegetables and suffer while others skate comfortably into old age on whiskey and bitterness. But I can look with tenderness on the nineteen-year-old girl sitting lonely and wounded in her little green Pontiac. She was determined to search within the problem for a solution when the Answer was there in the car, sitting with her in her heartache.

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Several months later, while visiting the home of Lou and Friedrich, he began working on a cycle of poems he called “the prayers,” which would later make up the first part of The Book of Hours, the first of his mature poetic works. In 2013, these initial poems were translated and republished in their early draft form by Mark S. Burrows as Prayers of a Young Poet (a nod to Rilke’s famous Letters to a Young Poet). I first stumbled across Prayers of a Young Poet several years ago, and was captivated by the lines of prayer #2: I live my life in widening rings which spread out to cover everything I may not complete the last one, but I’ll surely try:I’m circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I’ve been circling for thousands of years— and I don’t yet know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a vast song…. That was about as far as I got. Last fall, I picked up Prayers of a Young Poet again. Early 2017 had brought on a bout of unexpected and severe depression, unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and along with it, a sense of spiritual darkness. There were many days when I wondered where God’s voice was in the midst of dark thoughts, or I cursed God for the silence. As I gradually emerged out of the depression itself, what then began was a time of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction. It was in this space that I re-encountered Rilke’s prayers. Prayers of a Young Poet are a perfect example of what Dorothy Sayers called the poetry of search versus the poetry of statement. For Sayers, search poetry is about exploration and groping, whereas statement poetry is didactic, teaching a lesson that has been learned. Rilke is supremely a poet of search, as I found in Prayers of a Young Poet. This can be seen in the poem above, which describes him as “circling around God, around the ancient tower.” I also see this in another dominant metaphor throughout the prayers, one that fascinated me deeply, and that is God as ineffable darkness. Take for example prayer #3: My God is dark and like a clump of a hundred roots drinking silently. I lift myself from His warmth; more than this I don’t know, for all my branches rest in the depths and only sway in the winds. This sense of God as darkness and silence is also accompanied by a sense of yearning. From prayer #6: You, neighbor God, when I sometimes wake You with loud knocks in the long nights, I do so because I rarely hear You breathing and know You’re alone in the vast hall. And when You need something, no one’s there to offer a drink to Your outstretched hand. I’m always listening. Give me a sign; I’m very near.Only a thin wall lies between us— by chance; for it could be that a cry from Your mouth or from mine— and down it falls without any noise or sound at all.The wall is built up from Your paintings.And they stand before You like names. And when the light flames in me and claims You in my deep, it squanders itself as radiance upon their frames.And my senses, which darken so soon, are without a home and parted from You. In saying, “The wall is built up from Your paintings” I believe Rilke is referencing the religious iconography he experienced while in Russia. Rilke seems to be suggesting that our very attempts to capture the divine can often be a stumbling block or a barrier to experiencing God. Translator Mark S. Burroghs suggests that the “prayers” reveal “[Rilke’s] desire to loose God from the conscious realm of the intellect, to seek the divine not through concepts or doctrines but rather in the experiences communicated in ‘the deep,’ by means of images and metaphors….We encounter this God in the ongoing experience of creation, and above all in the primal darkness that represents each new experience of beginning. ‘The dark of God’ is not sheer absence but is rather a gesture toward a presence we can ‘sense’ but cannot know: ‘Don’t let go of me with Your hands,’ he cries, ‘for I am night from Your night.’….Darkness allows for the emergence of this ‘second life’ in our experience; it is the place of every new beginning, according to Rilke.” Looking back, I can see that this has been true in my life. Darkness led to the beginning of a renewal in my spiritual life that I now see was desperately needed. Old, bad ideas of God and myself had to be plunged into a dark abyss, in order for the Spirit to hover once again over chaos and wait for the quickening word. I love the dark hours of my being, for they deepen my senses; in them as in old letters I find my daily life already lived in pious words, so soft and subdued.From them I’ve come to know that I have room for a second life, timeless and wide.

The season of school is now upon us! To celebrate, we offer you a few of our favorite Rabbit Room books at reduced prices. Click through to learn more. We have three bundles available. The first is Jonathan Rogers’ entire Wilderking Trilogy, plus the accompanying curriculum guide, at $16 less than its value. Click here to view this bundle in the store. The second bundle is Jennifer Trafton’s Henry & the Chalk Dragon with a curriculum guide for only $10. Click here to view this bundle. And finally, we’re offering McKelvey’s The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog for a reduced price of $12. Click here to view this in the store. You can click here to view all three bundle options in the Rabbit Room Store. We wish you a wonderful school year!

Welcome to Week One of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2. If you haven’t read all of that yet, no worries! Feel free to jump into the conversation whenever you can. Imagine for a moment that you’re an Earth human walking on Mars. What would you think on this alien world? You’re wandering around (not too far from whatever hypothetical spaceship you took there), encased in a suit of Earth materials, breathing Earth air. You might drag your boot through the red dust to leave a mark, test out the gravity, examine rocks. Maybe you thought you understood what you were getting into, but the foreign sky and landscape show all your studying from worlds away barely scratch the surface of what Mars is. I kind of imagine this is what some of us Christians sound like when we talk about “The Culture:” standing in the middle of it, trying to make sense of what we see. Some say our relationship to culture is like a fish swimming in water, surrounded and influenced, but not consciously aware. James K. A. Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, talks about cultural liturgies, the habits and practices that shape our lives, and I think that might be a little closer to the truth. I suspect if you’re a regular at The Rabbit Room, you share the impulse to think deeply about the things that shape us. We love to look at the world we wander through. We love to talk about culture from a Christ-centered perspective. We want to examine it, redeem it, influence it. All of this is good and has its place, and that’s why we’re the people who would pick up a book with a title like Culture Making. But before we get too far in this conversation, a common language is helpful. So here we are at the beginning, where Crouch starts his argument by defining some terms. It's beautiful, isn't it? We are the creations of a God that made something out of nothing—a universe stuffed with all manner of glory, from galaxies to electrons to the mysterious spaces between them. And our great impulse is to make something of this world. Jen Rose Yokel “Culture is what we make of the world” becomes a defining refrain in this book. He goes on to say it’s “our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.” (pg. 23) It’s beautiful, isn’t it? We are the creations of a God that made something out of nothing — a universe stuffed with all manner of glory, from galaxies to electrons to the mysterious spaces between them. And our great impulse is to make something of this world. Culture points to our impulse to take raw materials and make. Some of the things we create will remake the world: cities, interstates, the printing press, the Internet. Some will have a less grand impact—the quick dinners we throw together—but they are no small thing. As you read this week, it might help to make notes on the terms Crouch lays out, like culture, cultural good (or artifact), and some broader concepts like multiculturalism and cultural spheres. We’re going to carry these terms with us as we explore Culture Making together in the next few weeks. For now, here’s a question to consider: If it’s true that you don’t have to be a massive influencer or great artist to be a “culture maker,” consider this: how do you make something of the world? (Think about your relationships, family, work, play, etc.) Please share your thoughts in the comments! And for more discussion questions, visit the Culture Making Book Group thread at The Rabbit Room Forum. And click here for the first post and introduction to this series.

In an early chapter of Henry and the Chalk Dragon, La Muncha Elementary School receives a visit from two mysterious people whom Henry hears referred to as “Bored Members” and who walk around in dark suits and glasses a la The Matrix, write things in their notebooks, and terrify the creatively repressed and desperately sycophantic principal. As Principal Bunk (with a cheerful smile that seems permanently glued to his face) boasts about the school’s stellar safety record and perfectly polished doorknobs, the Bored Members interrupt him: “But Principal Bunk—” said the Bored Man. “We’re sorry to say—” said the Bored Woman. “The Bored has decided that there will no longer be a need for doorknobs.” “Yes, doorknobs have been cut out of the budget.” Principal Bunk stopped walking and swallowed so hard that Henry could see the swallow slide all the way down his necktie. “Doorknobs?” “Studies have shown that doorknobs will not help students do any better on tests. Therefore, all doorknobs must be turned in to the Bored by next week.” I thought I was writing a gentle satire. That’s what I love to do in a story, after all: pounce on the little idiosyncrasies of people and situations and blow them up to ridiculous proportions, in order to make myself (and hopefully the reader) smile. Henry Penwhistle’s imagination is larger-than-life; so must the forces of antagonism in his world be. His otherwise glorious teacher has forgotten her own childhood fantasies and doubted her own creativity so much that she leads the class in an exercise of vapid artistic conformity. The class bully refuses to believe in anything that is not on a test. The principal gives Henry a stern lecture on the dangers of an untamed imagination in an effort to prepare him for the “real world”—a world that only cares about facts and numbers and budgets, not art. The Lunch Lady is forced to suppress her wild culinary creativity in favor of cafeteria pizza. And Henry’s mischievous Chalk Dragon is not allowed in the National Vegetable Week Art Show because it is neither a vegetable nor a vegetarian. I was always afraid of going too far; afraid that someone wouldn’t get the light-hearted jab in the ribs and instead would take the book as an attack on the school system, and that I would be getting angry letters from board members and principals and real-life-superhero teachers everywhere. But this past school year I spoke to a group of public school teachers who had read Henry, and thankfully they did not pelt me with erasers. In fact, their response to my over-the-top caricature of La Muncha Elementary School was, “How did you know?” The scene about the Bored cutting doorknobs out of the budget was one of their favorite parts of the whole book. Apparently they found it hilariously close to the mark. Exactly what we expect might happen next, they said. One teacher told me about a school that had actually outlawed crayons, even in the youngest grades, because crayons weren’t helping the students perform any better academically. Coloring was a waste of time. If an administrator entered a classroom, woe to the teacher if there were any crayons in view anywhere. Good grief. I thought I was writing satire. La Muncha Elementary School was meant, as I said, to be an exaggerated caricature for comic effect; but like all caricatures, it relies for its humor on a fondly or grimly recognized hint of reality. I am not qualified to pronounce judgments on our educational system. But as a writer of books for children, a teacher of children, and a creatively repressed person who has spent much of her life struggling to get out of boxes, I have plenty of reasons for concern. I've learned (despite being a grammar nerd and a former editor) that I have to begin most of my creative writing classes by assuring the students that I won't be correcting their spelling or punctuation—that I only care about how they're using imagination—because so many kids are so uptight about being correct and pleasing the teacher that they can't simply let loose and write. Jennifer Trafton For years, I’ve heard stories from teachers, school librarians, and parents—about the arts being cut out of the curriculum, about second grade students becoming physically ill with anxiety during standardized testing week, about school days that leave no time for creative play and curriculum requirements that do not recognize any instructional value in studying (or making) art for its own sake, about students who don’t even know what to do with a brief period of unstructured creative time, when given the rare chance. I’ve learned (despite being a grammar nerd and a former editor) that I have to begin most of my creative writing classes by assuring the students that I won’t be correcting their spelling or punctuation—that I only care about how they’re using imagination—because so many kids are so uptight about being correct and pleasing the teacher that they can’t simply let loose and write. I’ve taught kids who hated writing because the only writing they got to do in school was “boring”—meaning they were told exactly what to do and how to do it, with little freedom to be creative or write about something they were passionate about. This is by no means just a public school issue. I once came across a homeschool writing curriculum that insisted children should not be allowed to write stories until the older grades, after they’d learned to distinguish between “real” and “not real.” Literalism first. Imagination can wait. I teach lots of homeschooled kids, and I’ve had parents say, “I’ve tried and tried to get my kids interested in writing, but they always see it as a chore, as just more homework. But when they come out of your class they are bursting with enthusiasm to write a story. What have I been doing wrong?” And when I press deeper, it turns out that they inevitably have been turning every writing activity into a lesson about spelling and grammar, correcting mistakes as they go, and the kids’ enthusiasm and creativity were getting squelched by mechanics and structure. But that’s backwards. A good writer has to be a master of grammar and sentence structure, but that’s the second step, not the first. The first is falling in love with an idea and with the process of bringing that idea to life. Whatever form a child’s education takes—public school, private school, homeschool—and no matter what official requirements are in place (I will leave others better qualified to debate this), I hope that certain conditions will prevail in the end, because the root of my concern about education lies in my understanding of the importance and especially the process of creativity. Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized expert on creativity and gave an enormously popular 2006 TED talk called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” He tells the story of a 6-year-old girl who was drawing a picture in the back of the classroom. Her teacher asked her what she was drawing, and she answered, “God.” The teacher said, “But no one knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.” (By the way, his whole talk is hilarious and well worth twenty minutes of your time.) Robinson’s point is this: “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” To be creative you have to be willing to risk making lots of mistakes—but as we get older we learn that we’re not supposed to make mistakes, there are right answers and wrong answers and we don’t want to be wrong, and so we conform, we stop taking risks. But everybody knows you can’t be original by sitting down and trying to be original. You have to let ideas pour out of you, right or wrong—only afterward do you (or others) go back and evaluate those ideas and decide what has value and what doesn’t. We writers have a special name for this outpouring: it’s called THE FIRST DRAFT. The first draft is playing on paper, letting your imagination go wherever it wants to go. And only in that playful freedom will you be able to find any nuggets of true originality. As the late Steve Jobs preached and demonstrated, unconventional (and world-changing) ideas come from an unconventional life, from coloring outside the lines and from drawing new lines between the dots no one else has connected. Give the children crayons, and watch them innovate. I hope there will be space in a child's education to allow for such blowing-the-roof-open, crazy brainstorming without it being turned into a 'teaching moment,' because that is the teaching moment: the free exercise of the imagination, the outlawing of 'wrong' or 'right' for a few brief minutes when the only test that matters is the test of creative fearlessness. Audacious play. Jennifer Trafton Last summer I led a workshop for 7-12-year-olds that consisted entirely of coming up with the most fantastical MacGyver-esque inventions we could. I gave the kids random pictures of ordinary objects—bicycles, duct tape, cotton balls, clocks, trampolines, rubber bands, trash cans—and asked them to draw and describe imagined inventions, somehow incorporating those objects, that would improve the world. Much hilarity and ingenuity ensued. All I can say is that we can look forward to a future age of dramatic teleporting, space travel, lock picking, and brilliant new ways of waking up in the morning. There was no hint of “well, that’s impossible . . . how can you climb a ladder beyond the earth’s atmosphere without at least an oxygen mask?” I redirected the “but hows” of the more literal-minded classmates. I reminded them that once upon a time someone said, “I wish I could put a little box up to my ear and talk to someone on the other side of the world,” and everyone around that person said he was CRAZY. And he was. Until he wasn’t. I hope there will be space in a child’s education to allow for such blowing-the-roof-open, crazy brainstorming without it being turned into a “teaching moment,” because that is the teaching moment: the free exercise of the imagination, the outlawing of “wrong” or “right” for a few brief minutes when the only test that matters is the test of creative fearlessness. Audacious play. I preach tirelessly about the importance of playing because I don’t do it very well. I desperately need to relearn and relearn how to play. No one knows more than I do how difficult it is to retain this ability as an adult. The only thing that helps me keep that faint spirit of playfulness alive in my soul is my memory of having had free rein to do so as a child. If we ever take that away from children—if we suppress the instinct toward creative play even before it meets the inevitable challenge of growing up . . . God help us all. Who will be our next Einstein or Edison or Shakespeare—or Steve Jobs, for that matter? Who will disturb our complacent hearts with beautiful stories and with art that startles and shakes the status quo? Who will help us imagine a new kind of world? “Be brave, Sir Henry,” he whispered as Miss Pimpernel’s hand closed on the doorknob. Years later, when Henry Penwhistle remembered this day and told the story again and again to himself, it seemed to him that this was the moment—the hand on the doorknob moment—when everything changed. Before, the adventure with the dragon was like a balloon bobbing at the end of a string in Henry’s hand, trying to break out of his grasp. After this moment, the string came loose, and Henry realized he had never known—indeed, no one at La Muncha Elementary School had ever known—just how wildly an imagination can fly when it has broken free. Perhaps the Bored Members were wise to take away doorknobs. For it is a dangerous thing to open a door. Dangerous, yes. As dangerous and as necessary as hope. We have a special back-to-school deal in the Rabbit Room Store for the month of August! Check it out by clicking here.

“…And that’s why I never read parenting books anymore.” – Recently spoken by a dear friend and mother of four. We had been discussing the particular challenges we were facing raising teenagers. My friend is a diligent mom who takes seriously the calling of raising children. Why had she sworn off reading books that promise healthier, well-adjusted and happy children? I knew the answer without further probing. I felt similarly. After two decades of parenting, I know I should be more ______ (you fill in the blank with your “should be;” patient or demanding, laid-back or scheduled, creative and fun or thoughtful and serious), but at the end of the day, regardless of the books I’ve read and the podcasts I’ve listened to, I’m still stuck with me. Which often feels defeating. Which is why my friend doesn’t read parenting books anymore. She’s tired of feeling defeated. For those of us who face similar challenges in parenting, how do we seek parenting advice that is timeless and life-giving, not trendy and guilt-inducing? Our generation of parents, unlike any who’ve come before us, gorges on endless information, yet we’re starving for wisdom. Artist Makoto Fujimura, when discussing the difference between works of art that last for centuries versus those that are popular for a brief period of time, poses the five-hundred-year question: “What is the five-hundred-year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian 15 seconds of fame.” Perhaps the same question should be asked of raising children. A multitude of blogs and books and parenting podcasts are reminiscent of Warhol’s 15 seconds of fame. The messaging is bright and shiny and “all the cool (adult) kids” are quoting them. But what is the parental wisdom parallel to those works of art which impact the far-reaching future? Is it possible to sit under the teaching of someone who speaks words which are hopeful and eternal? Teaching that inspires rather than leaves us feeling defeated? I’m grateful to say that Clay and Sally Clarkson’s latest book, The Lifegiving Parent, is an affirmative answer to the five-hundred-year question. The wisdom and principles examined are rooted in eternal truths. How do we seek parenting advice that is timeless and life-giving, not trendy and guilt-inducing? Julie Silander The Lifegiving Parent is the third book in the Clarksons’ “Lifegiving” trilogy. The common thread woven throughout all three books is a winsome, hopeful, scripture-based invitation to create a home that offers life to all who enter. The first two books address the heart of the home and the ministry of gathering around the family table. Both books inspire. Both books give practical advice. This third book is no exception. However, The Lifegiving Parent is more devotional than conversational. I’d recommend reading with a journal and a pen in hand to take notes for further reflection. It’s a book seasoned with deep theological truths that are best savored in small bites. Perhaps this statement in the introduction of The Lifegiving Parent best sums up the heart of the book: “At the core, lifegiving parenting is less about what you do and more about who you are—a child of the living God who is connected with Him and is ready to share that life with your children so that they may know Him too.” Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of parenting, including Numbering Your Child’s Days, Nurturing Your Child’s Spirit, Guarding Your Child’s Heart, Renewing Your Child’s Mind, Strengthening Your Child’s Faith, Shaping Your Child’s Will, Cultivating Your Child’s Character, and Forming Your Child’s Imagination. Clay explores the theological basis and practical application for each topic, then Sally shares a personal reflection of how that particular element played out in their family. I was fortunate enough to encounter the Clarksons’ writing when my children were very young. It’s not hyperbole to say that they’ve had an indelible impact on the shaping of our family. Although our older two children are grown and our youngest three are teenagers, the wisdom that Clay and Sally share is no less significant when relating to our adult children than it was when we were parenting toddlers. I’m confident that the truth, grace, and practical advice offered will be just as relevant when our children—and our grandchildren—become parents. To answer Mako’s “five-hundred-year question,” The Lifegiving Parent has the potential to impact families, and in turn the cultures in which they live, far into the future. Parenting is a joy and a privilege. It can also be depleting and disheartening—particularly when I’ve exhausted all my resources and still feel inadequate. However, The Lifegiving Parent reminds us that coming to the end of ourselves is where true life begins. As we rediscover the one source of joy, wisdom and life, we are renewed and able to offer that life to our children. The Clarksons remind us that the essence of parenting is, indeed, “One beggar showing another beggar where to find bread.” You can purchase The Lifegiving Parent here at The Rabbit Room Store.

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to read through the Psalms as a daily practice. Once I reach the end, I return to the beginning all over again. It’s become a circular rhythm in my life, like the ticking hands of the clock or the slow circle of seasons throughout the year. Each psalm feels fresh as I approach it from a different vantage point on the calendar and from the ever-evolving perspective of one who is in constant conversation with its poetry and prayers. As a lover of words, a lover of deep emotions felt and expressed, I’ve always had an affinity for the Psalms. It is a step away from the practical practices of faith in the Old Testament and a step closer to Christ in the New Testament. When I find it difficult to relate to Levitical law or challenging to walk with one as sure and passionate as Paul, I feel the Psalms like a reverberating song in my spirit—a gap bridged by a melody. The writers of this book have set a precedent of truth-telling—I have learned from them to take my every thought and feeling before God without shame. David’s struggle with longing, frustration, and pain teaches me to call my own struggles by name. Ethan the Ezrahite teaches me how to craft words of abandon in worship. I learn from Moses to number my days and seek wisdom in the numbering. The Sons of Korah sing with me in lament and in praise. As I’ve spent time with these rich writings, I’ve discovered that the absence of shame sets desire free. The Psalms are a book of desire—for revenge, for forgiveness, for safety, for shelter, for love, for truth, for rescue, for guidance, for spiritual awakening. They teach me how to desire wholly, without becoming suffocated by shame, with passion and purpose for every secret longing. Here in poetry and prayers, these longings find their place. As a long-time follower of Christ, I have found a deep resistance in many Christian circles to allowing longing to have its place. Desire is either muted or over-spiritualized. I rarely hear desire discussed in a church or small group setting as a healthy expression of our humanity. Most often, the small flicker of desire has been doused with heavy-handed use of scripture about denying one’s flesh, or reminders of Jesus as a man of sorrows and suffering. The Psalms teach me how to desire wholly, without becoming suffocated by shame, with passion and purpose for every secret longing. Here in poetry and prayers, these longings find their place. Kimberly Coyle I often see this suppression of desire among Christian artists when discussing their work. Countless times, I’ve heard artists state that their work is purely for “an audience of one,” and their only desire is to glorify God with their gift. I understand the impetus behind this—it’s right and holy and good to create for the glory of God. But, surely the desire to share one’s art with others, to communicate truth, and create beauty for the sake of beauty are right and holy and good desires too. Walter Wangerin, Jr. writes in his book Beate Not the Poore Desk, “Art is an act, a process. In order to be complete, writing requires a reader.” Music requires a listener, fine art an audience. Wangerin goes on to say, “Only by the viewer’s responding act does the artist move outside himself into a community.” We create for God, but also for the joy of sharing, for the pleasure of reaching across a divide and discovering a community of people who interact with our offering. I see similar expressions in other areas of life and community within the Christian church. While out to dinner, a friend from church once told our table of fellow churchgoers that she denies herself nothing—she eats what she fancies, loves what she loves, and spends time on pursuits she enjoys. She said it without the accompanying shame I often feel when desire rises in me. Heads swiveled in her direction and jaws dropped, mine included. It was an unexpected admission, and I felt an equal sense of awe for her honesty and judgement for such an unabashed claim. I confess to jealousy as well because I long to walk with such freedom. I don’t know how to be honest about my deepest longings in community—it requires a vulnerability I don’t possess. My ultimate desires are fulfilled in relationship with God through Jesus, yet what of these longings for connection with others? For self-expression? For work? Wisdom? Justice? Many of these desires are meant to be fulfilled through relationship, spiritual community, and through the work of my hands here on Earth. While I have agency to act on these desires in God-honoring ways, God is ultimately sovereign over them. David writes in Psalm 145:16, “You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” There is a givenness I must acknowledge, a givenness that can’t be manufactured by my own striving or hard work. In part, I am to do the work and seek the good. But, like so many of the psalmists, I’m also meant to sit with open hands and a heart cupped, willing to receive. I’m learning to hold questions of desire openly before God without shame, trusting he will satisfy my mouth (my soul, my body, my mind) with good things. As I continue my circle through the Psalms, I find myself in excellent company.

[Editor’s note: About a week ago, Jen Rose Yokel wrote an invitation to all Rabbit Room readers to participate in our very own Rabbit Room book group. In anticipation of Andy Crouch speaking at Hutchmoot this year, we will be delving into his book Culture Making, a wonderful conversation-starter about that timeless question of how to be a Christian in the world. Click through for an excerpt of Jen’s original invitation. Culture Making is available here at the Rabbit Room Store.] “What is it, exactly, that we are called to do in the world? Are we called to ‘transform culture’ or to ‘change the world’? If we are to be culture makers, where in the world do we begin?” – Andy Crouch, Culture Making Laure Hittle and I will be your hosts as we discuss the meaning of culture, the role our Christian faith plays in it, and how we can make something beautiful and true of the world we’ve been given. If you missed our previous reading groups, here’s what you can expect. For six weeks, we’ll read Culture Making together. Each week, we’ll share a reflection here on The Rabbit Room blog, then offer a up few questions for discussion in the blog comments. We have also set up a thread on The Rabbit Room Forums for longer conversations that you can access by clicking here. Here’s the reading schedule (subject to change): Week 1 (8/6): Introduction, Ch 1-2 Week 2 (8/13): Ch 3-5 Week 3 (8/20): Ch 6-8 Week 4 (8/27): Ch 9-11 Week 5 (9/3): Ch 12-14 Week 6 (9/10): Ch 15-16 Culture Making is now available in The Rabbit Room store. Order a copy today, and we’ll see you on August 6th!

In case you haven’t heard, A. S. Peterson (aka Pete Peterson) has written an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein for the stage. If you’re anything like me, you have long assumed, without even realizing it, that you know all there is to know about Frankenstein. I mean, it’s just a cautionary tale about the hubris of scientific progress at the expense of our humanity, right? With a Monster that groans inarticulately, groping in the darkness of his brutish existence, his mad scientist-maker laughing maniacally in the background? Not even close. In Pete’s own words, “this is not your mama’s Frankenstein.” And while he’s speaking of his own play, it also turns out that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was never what the last hundred years or so of pop culture had told us it was in the first place. Show up to the play or look inside the book, and you’ll find an eloquent Monster, theological questions of creation and death just as abounding as questions of scientific progress, and a Victor Frankenstein indelibly shaped by the drama of his family. I had the great pleasure of visiting Studio Tenn’s second read-through of Pete’s play adaptation—his own tenth draft—and I was blindsided by the depth and beauty of the story, the characters, and the symbolism woven gently into every moment of the play. What follows is the first part of an interview with A. S. Peterson—in it, we talk about the transition from novel-writing to playwriting, the hidden treasures within the covers of Frankenstein, the endangered art of theater, and much more. Enjoy, and stay tuned for the rest of our conversation. Show dates begin August 31st and run through September 9th. You can buy tickets here. Pete: One of the questions I think is important to address about this show is simply, “Why Frankenstein?” And I would say this is not your mama’s Frankenstein—as a culture, we’re so familiar with the trope of an inarticulate beast walking around with arms outstretched, and that’s such a crime because it’s not in the book at all. Drew: So why did you choose Frankenstein, and what does it have to say to us now? Pete: I didn’t choose it. Studio Tenn asked me to adapt it because this year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A lot of people consider it the first ever science fiction novel. It’s one of the most frequently adapted books in the English language, into film and play and so on. So first of all, we wanted to celebrate the anniversary of a monumental work of literature. I think if I create something, it's my responsibility to love it and give it its best chance in the world. And if I don't do that, not only am I betraying it, but I'm betraying my gift. And Frankenstein as a story asserts that if you begin to hate the thing you've created, it can indeed become monstrous. A. S. Peterson Matt Logan, the director, asked me if I’d be interested in working on this—and this is coming right off the heels of The Battle of Franklin—and I immediately jumped on it. Those who know me understand that reaction, because a lot of my work tends to be shaped by high adventure. And at its core, this novel is very much high adventure. That combined with the language, which is very Shakespearean, greatly appealed to me. I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought I knew the story, but it turned out I didn’t really know it at all. It’s far more complex than we’ve been taught to believe based on the last hundred years of adaptations. What surprised me about reading it was the way it challenged my assumption that it was merely about the potential pitfalls of scientific advancement and the moral questions involved in that. I didn’t expect to find so many rich theological implications woven throughout the book. I believe we are all created in God’s image, and that image since the fall has been cracked, so we are now broken vessels. So if we, like Victor Frankenstein, were to attempt to make a life of our own, that means that life is now created in our image. So we are creating a fractured image of a fractured image. What does that mean? Would this new life be beholden to me in the same way that I am beholden to God? And if that’s true, do I have a responsibility then to redeem it of its brokenness? These are all compelling questions to me, and while they are implicit in Mary Shelley’s book, I’ve never seen anyone bring them to light in their adaptations. Taken further, that idea applies to more than just the relationship between God and humanity. I think it’s also about the question of art: “What is my responsibility as a creator to the thing I create?” Whether that’s a child, or a book, or an album, or a painting. I think if I create something, it’s my responsibility to love it and give it its best chance in the world. And if I don’t do that, not only am I betraying it, but I’m betraying my gift. And Frankenstein as a story asserts that if you begin to hate the thing you’ve created, it can indeed become monstrous. Drew: One thing I noticed at the read-through was how fluidly this topic of creation and the theological aspects of Frankenstein are interwoven with family. I was struck by how it presents the father-son relationship and creator-art relationship in dialogue, in analogy. That’s one of those things I didn’t anticipate. All of a sudden I had this lesson in family dynamics and Victor is maybe trying to resurrect his mom, earning his dad’s approval, and his dad is trying to make Elizabeth into his lost wife— Pete: Yeah, we’re all created and shaped by forces outside of us, and what does that look like? That’s what interests me about the play. The book takes that literally: let’s actually create, let the creation be shaped by the forces of a broken world, and see what happens. Drew: Which makes the Monster’s voice so weighty. Did you feel the pressure when you were putting words into his mouth? Pete: You know, the Monster was actually the easiest character for me to write. Drew: Really? Ultimately, if your villains aren't compelling, neither are your stories. It's the job of every storyteller to make all their characters as complex and human as they can be. A. S. Peterson Pete: I feel the deep, lonesome grief of the Monster. And if you look at any poetry, the first poetry people write is about how lonely they are, how awful the world is, how no one understands them. That’s sort of the low-hanging fruit, and that’s who the Monster is. His first encounters with the world are hateful and devoid of love, so he grows into having this voice of absolute grief. And that was fun to write. I put a lot of thought into how to avoid making it sentimental and keep it more universal, but it came pretty naturally. By contrast, it was really hard to write Victor. Because let’s be honest, in Frankenstein, Victor is the real Monster. And if you want to extend that even further, mankind is the monster. My early drafts of the play were much more melodramatic, Victor was very clearly the mad scientist, and you could only really identify with the Monster because he was so clearly being wronged. So in later drafts of the play, it was really important to me that we found ways to make Victor look like ourselves. And that’s where family dynamics come in: in order for me to believe he can do these monstrous things, I have to know who Victor is and why Victor is. That was exciting. When I started to hone in on that, the play really came alive. From scene to scene, I could start to feel my loyalties shift based on who was making their argument. Ultimately, if your villains aren’t compelling, neither are your stories. It’s the job of every storyteller to make all their characters as complex and human as they can be. Honestly, that’s one flaw of Mary Shelley’s book. It heavily employs stereotypes and melodrama. As a result, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for the Victor character. He’s very over the top in his wildness. I had to temper that to tell the story well. Drew: And you tempered his character in part through drawing out his family relationships, correct? Did you find any other ways to do that? Pete: There were two things. One was simply toning down the language. I love Mary Shelley’s high language, but it definitely strays into hyperbole. It’s a caricature of itself; you can lampoon it. I’m not kidding when I say there are probably five or six times throughout the book where Victor tears open his shirt and gnashes his teeth at the moon, crying for all his grief. I mean, okay, nobody actually does that. Maybe one time in your life, but not five times over the course of a year. Drew: That would have to be a bad year. Pete: Oh yeah, a really, really bad year. So toning down language immediately helped Victor’s case. And then bringing in family issues helped make him more believable—and that element was barely there in the book. I felt like I was blowing on the embers of what made Victor who he was. It was so subtle in the book, which is funny, because most of the time Mary Shelley is the opposite of subtle. It made me wonder if she even realized what she was putting in there. In a scene early on in the book, when Victor is born, his parents are fawning over him, and they say, “Look at this thing we’ve created. We will love him and shape him and train him in the way he should go.” Those words directly contrast what Victor says about the thing he makes. His reaction is to hate and loathe his creation. He fails to train it up in the way it should go. Drew: It’s probably helpful to clarify here that the book is basically half and half: first you hear from Victor, then from the Monster. Pete: Correct. I think you’re about a hundred-twenty pages into the book before you even see the Monster as anything other than something laying on a table. The book is told from first-person perspective. Well, it’s more complicated than that—it’s an epistolary novel, meaning it’s made up of letters, and the letters are being written by the captain of a ship and sent to his sister. He’s relating the story that Victor—whom he has discovered in the Arctic—is relating to him. So it’s first-person from the captain, and then it switches to first-person from Victor within that framework. But the point is that all you’re initially getting is Victor’s own commentary on his thoughts and feelings. That’s a really hard thing to translate on stage, so we had to give a lot of thought to how to make it more vibrant, vital, and confrontational, and that required me to alter the story’s structure. So I decided to present the play as a trial in which Victor and the Monster are both making their cases before the audience. My initial goal was to have the Monster alive and on the scene by the fifteen minute-mark. That way, throughout the course of the play, you have his perspective and Victor’s perspective in a sort of tug-of-war, and you’re constantly having to ask yourself who you will believe. Then when you get to the end of the play, you’re compelled to make some kind of judgment. Drew: And do you want the audience to come away from the play having made a judgment that, even in some small way, impacts their own lives as well? Pete: The play has a lot to say to us as a society, and I don’t just mean the low-hanging fruit of science and artificial intelligence. In the end, humanity is being put on trial. The audience should come away with the moral, “If we are not kind to one another, if we do not love one another, we are essentially creating monsters of ourselves and our own society.” Those monsters are being born out every day. So the play is ultimately a plea to find a kinder way to be in the world. Drew: So at the end of the play, the question is not, “Do you side with Victor or with the Monster?” but— Pete: Right, it’s actually you who are on trial. The play is structured to appear as a trial between Victor and the Monster, but the Monster has this ironic line: “Behold, the great justice of man.” He’s pointing out the incredibly broken nature of our societies. That’s at the heart of the play and the book. Drew: It’s cool that you superficially have the audience feel like they’re judging the Monster and Victor, but by the end of it they’ll come away with the sense that they were in fact the ones on trial. Pete: I would be delighted if that’s actually how it works itself out! Drew: It’s a way of getting through to people without scaring them away with the very prospect of evaluating our lives together. It feels more effective than preaching. Pete: I mean that’s the challenge of art, isn’t it? To say something that people might not want to hear— Drew: But slip through the back door to say it. Like Nathan confronting David. Pete: Very much so. And the other challenge is, while these are my intentions for the play, they may go over the head of the general audience. And it needs to be able to work anyway, merely as a cautionary tale about science and discovery. And it still needs to work just as a Monster play. Hopefully we’ll get some jumps and scares, too. But as a creator, we’re always building some kind of architecture that we understand all the ins and outs of, but that nobody else may ever dial into—and that needs to be okay. The architecture is there, regardless of anyone’s exploring it, and that alone is good. Stay tuned for Part II of our interview. In the meantime, you can purchase tickets to Frankenstein (August 31-September 9) by clicking here.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Heading south from Salt Lake City, you can drive for hours without seeing anything but rocks and scrub. The road is straight and flat, and the darkening April sky closes down on you like the cover of an old hardback. We were staying in Brian Head, at a resort 9,600 feet above sea level. We’d come for the off-season price, not the skiing, so each morning we wound our way past the snow drifts and abandoned ski lifts, leaving the high-altitude winter for the barren country we’d covered on the way down. We wanted to see Bryce and Zion, and both were within a couple hours’ drive. It was a bizarre commute. You’d swing around a corner and see a panorama of snow-capped mountains before passing through a forest of evergreens. Then the trees would vanish as a new desert of tumbled stones spilled out ahead of you revealing some of the most startling and beautiful geological formations in the world. Bryce Canyon National Park is a collection of mangled spires, arches, and tunnels cut in the high, red stone by ice and snow, by wind and time. The red sandstone canyons and soaring mountains of Zion National Park are no less rugged, though they convey a greater sense of grandeur. I’m forever falling short in my attempts to describe the scale of that place, the wonder of it. We camped on a white cliff in Zion, near signs that warned of mountain lions. We huddled in a tent while the frigid wind shredded the canyon. We carried our packs over high meadows and picked our way through stony passes. It wasn’t quite spring. The air was full of—something—uncertainty or anticipation, a sense of almost. The ends of the tree branches were plump, bulging with buds too shy to blossom. Here and there we glimpsed a haze of new green on a shrub. On our second morning we ate breakfast at an overlook and watched the sun touch the edges of the peaks and slide down into the canyon. There were times when we lost the path. We scouted the mountainside for cairns to show us the way. Once, I turned to look over my shoulder at the distance we had covered. I was amazed, pierced by the beauty of the place and the thrill of the journey. Then we were back in the car, weary and exhilarated, driving through barren Utah and forested Utah and into the snowy passes of Brian Head. That was where I heard it. “This is your heart.” Such a strange statement, that Spirit-whisper. The mapping of a heart is the work of eternity. Helena Sorensen I’d been wrestling with myself, in the days and weeks leading up to the trip, frustrated at my inability to manage my feelings. I was Jacob wrestling with Jacob, looking to be wounded in both thighs. I held two conflicting ideas about my internal world. The first related to an Old Testament passage: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” In that final question, I had always heard a horrified resignation. “No one can navigate those waters!” the Scripture seemed to say, or maybe, more accurately, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” And yet, I clung to the idea that my heart could be organized like a preschool classroom. In one long weekend, I should be perfectly capable of arranging my thoughts, feelings, memories, fears, and hopes into pre-labeled, color-coded bins. I was confused, mired, drowning when the words came. “This is your heart.” It is vast, diverse. You can drive for ages along the road of a particular feeling or hope, and everything seems simple and uniform. But there is always more to see. There are mountains so high you can scarcely catch your breath. There are canyons of copper stone and smooth-topped pulpits of red stone, pockets of beauty so lovely and surprising that only sorrow and time and the gentle, overpowering work of the Spirit could have carved them. There are fallow fields, trees almost in flower, a wonderful, waiting hope of coming beauty and harvest. There is room here. It will take a lifetime and more to explore it, to understand it. The mapping of a heart is the work of eternity. Madeleine L’Engle, in A Wind in the Door, addresses this confusion about size and perspective. Again and again, she reminds the reader that size is both “relative and irrelevant.” While we are awed by the immensity and complexity of the macrocosm, the expanding external universe, we fail to see that the microcosm is equally immense and complex. “How long does it take the Milky Way to rotate once around?” As no one else spoke, Meg answered, “Two hundred billion years, clockwise.” “So that gives us a general idea of the size of your galaxy, doesn’t it?” “Very general,” Calvin said. “Our minds can’t comprehend anything that huge, that macrocosmic.” “Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition. Think of the size of your galaxy. Now, think of your sun. It’s a star, and it is a great deal smaller than the entire galaxy, isn’t it?” “Of course.” “Think of yourselves, now, in comparison with the size of your sun. Think how much smaller you are. Now think of a mitochondrion, which live in the cells of all living things, and how much smaller a mitochondrion is than you.” “This time,” Calvin said, “the problem is that our minds can’t comprehend anything that microcosmic.” Later in the story, Meg witnesses the birth of a star, but this glorious event happens in such a way that the young star is no larger than the palm of her hand. She is confounded by the shift in perspectives. “How big am I?” she asks. Her teacher is quick to remind her that she must stop thinking about size. We set our goals, and dream our dreams, and pin our hopes on the grand idea of the macrocosmic, and all the while the infinite and microcosmic world of the interior goes woefully untended. This sacred place, and the sacred journey that takes us over each patch of ground, is perhaps the great work of our lives. Helena Sorensen The journey into the interior world of the human heart is not a weekend organization project. But neither is it something to be feared, avoided, or dismissed as insignificant. It is unmanageable, yes, in the same way that the changing terrains of Utah cannot be shoehorned into a single, uniform landscape. This is the dwelling place of the Most High God. He is pleased to dwell here. He knows the subtle textures of the rock formations and the very hour in which each bud will burst open. He is acquainted with the barren places and the frozen ones. His love is written in every drift of snow. We set our goals, and dream our dreams, and pin our hopes on the grand idea of the macrocosmic, and all the while the infinite and microcosmic world of the interior goes woefully untended. This sacred place, and the sacred journey that takes us over each patch of ground, is perhaps the great work of our lives. “Maybe nothing is more important,” says Buechner, “than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way, because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity . . . that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.” Author Dan Stone puts it even more simply: “Mind the journey inward.” There is room, and there is time. You do not have to wait for God to meet you there. His dwelling place is within you. Take His hand and grieve the ravaged ground. Marvel at the unexpected beauty. Tend the gardens and break up the fallow fields. When the sun drips over the edge of the canyon and you see the fingerprint of God etched into the rock of your soul, pause and take off your shoes. You are holy ground. Check out The Molehill, Volume 5 and all the other wonderful writing between its covers at the Rabbit Room Store.

I often tell people that Flannery O’Connor once wrote “the eye is an organ of judgment.” Turns out, she never wrote that. When I typed “the eye is an organ of judgment” into the Google machine, the only thing that came back was a picture of me, from a previous issue of The Habit in which I had misquoted Flannery O’Connor. Sorry about that. In my defense, however, I will say that my misquotation is a pretty good distillation of something that Flannery O’Connor actually did write, in her essay “Writing Short Stories,” which you can find in Mystery and Manners: For the writer of fiction, everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be gotten into it. It involves judgment. She goes on to say that the student-writer is often so interested in thoughts and emotions that he neglects the concrete and sensory details where storytelling actually happens: He thinks that judgment exists in once place and sense-impression in another. But for the fiction writer, judgment begins in the details he sees and how he sees them. The eye is an organ of judgment. O’Connor is specifically talking about fiction-writing in these passages, but she could be talking about any kind of writing. In fact, she could just as easily be talking about everyday life. A familiar scenario will demonstrate what I mean: You are at a stoplight, waiting for a left-turn arrow. You’re the fifth car in line, but you know from experience that six, sometimes seven cars usually make it through before the arrow turns, so you’ll be fine. You get your arrow. The first car starts through the intersection, then the second and the third. You take your foot off the brake to move forward. Then you put your foot back on the brake because you realize that the fourth car, the one in front of you, isn’t moving. You see that the driver in front of you is looking down at his phone. You give a little tap on your horn. Nothing. The turn-arrow turns yellow. You lean on the horn. The driver ahead of you jerks his head up as if from a deep sleep and lurches forward and through the intersection just as the light turns red again. You, meanwhile, are left to wait for the next arrow. Consider how many judgments you make in that moment. You judge that driver’s character and his home-raising. You reach conclusions regarding his ability to consider the feelings of others. You wonder how a person with such convoluted priorities could ever hold a job or otherwise contribute to society. How did this cascade of judgments start? It started with your eyes. You saw an arrow turn green. You saw three cars move. You saw a fourth car not move. You saw that the driver of that fourth car was looking down rather than looking ahead (you didn’t, by the way, even see a mobile phone). Those few visual stimuli were more than enough. The eye is an organ of judgment. This brings us to the oft-repeated writing advice, “Show, don’t tell.” What’s the difference? “Showing” is simply presenting to your reader what she would see and hear (and perhaps smell, taste, and touch) if she were present in the scene where the action is happening. “Telling” is everything else—explaining, editorializing, describing what’s going on inside a character’s head, providing backstory, summarizing action, etc. Imagine there was a video camera set up in the room where the action takes place. Anything that could appear in the video is showing. Anything you write that couldn’t appear in the video is telling. Here are two samples describing the same event; the first is all showing, and the second is mostly telling. Sample 1 (all showing): When the light turned green and the cars started to move, the car in front of me didn’t go anywhere. The driver just sat there, his head pointed down toward his lap, until I honked my horn… Sample 2 (mostly telling): When the arrow turned green and the cars started to move, the jackass in front of me just sits there, gawping at his phone as if it’s the Holy Grail or something, as if there’s not a whole line of people behind him who might have places to be. But God forbid that he should have to wait until he gets wherever he’s going to look at his texts or update his MySpace page or watch his cat videos or whatever he’s doing up there while the rest of us sit there and wait for him to notice that the world hasn’t stopped turning. In Sample 2, everything before the first comma is showing—what anybody at the red light would see—and everything after the first comma is telling—interpretation and commentary and speculation by the writer. The idea behind the “Show-Don’t-Tell” principle is that showing more closely approximates the way experience comes to us in real life. We gather information through our senses, then our logic and judgment go to work making sense of those inputs. When the person in front of you holds up a line of cars because he’s looking at his phone, you don’t need a narrator to tell you that he’s self-absorbed. You take in the sensory data (green arrow, no movement, driver looking down instead of looking at road), and you reach your own conclusion. And, by the way, almost everybody presented with that sensory data would reach a similar conclusion. While most of us need to do more showing and less telling, it's not at all true that you should always show and never tell. I often tell writers, however, that the way to earn the right to tell is by showing first. Jonathan Rogers When you choose to show rather than tell, you are trusting that your readers’ judgment apparatus is intact, and that she will reach the appropriate conclusions without being told what conclusions to reach. But you are also trusting your own ability to show the right things that will lead the reader to the appropriate judgments. Telling is a shortcut: Here’s what I want you to think about this. One important thing to note about showing and telling: it is hard to resist telling when you’re really trying to make a point. You want to leave sensory language behind and instead use emotional language, or maybe do a lot of explaining to drive your point home. But as counterintuitive as it sounds, writing tends to be more emotional when, instead of telling readers what to feel, you provide them with the kind of experience that evokes the emotion you want them to feel. In the two samples above, the second, more “tell-y” sample may have been more entertaining and interesting, but if you want to evoke the righteous anger we all feel when somebody else is texting and driving (a righteous anger that we don’t feel, by the way, when we text and drive), you’re better off writing something more like Sample 1, which gives the reader more space to exercise his own judgment. Along the same lines, if you’re trying to persuade, readers are more easily persuaded when they think they’ve reached a conclusion on their own, by exercising their own judgment, than when you tell them what to think. In both his fiction and his essays, Wendell Berry makes the case for agrarian values and rural living. When I read his essays, in which he is being openly persuasive, I want to argue back: Well, Wendell Berry, I’m glad you like living in rural Kentucky, but I quite like living where I can get decent Vietnamese food. When I read his novels, on the other hand, I want to sell out and move to rural Kentucky. But I digress. Let us return to showing and telling. While most of us need to do more showing and less telling, it’s not at all true that you should always show and never tell. Some of the most memorable writing you’ll ever see is very tell-y (even in the two samples above, I think the second, tell-y sample is more memorable than the first). I often tell writers, however, that the way to earn the right to tell is by showing first. If you want to read a story that is all showing and no (or almost no) telling, check out Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” It might leave you hankering for some good, old-fashioned telling. I will say this, though: every time I read that story, I like it a little better. For better or worse, telling tends to bring more meaning to the surface, whereas showing allows for more discovery by the reader. For further reading: The best thing I’ve ever read about showing and telling is the chapter, “Why You Need to Show and Tell,” in Alice LaPlante’s creative writing textbook, The Making of a Story. If you enjoyed this excellent advice from Jonathan Rogers, consider subscribing to his weekly letter, The Habit, to receive lots more. Jonathan will also teach a new section of his online course, Writing Close to the Earth, starting August 6th. The class is limited to twelve students. Click here to sign up.

We are having a very special Local Show tonight to celebrate the release of Russ Ramsey’s The Mission of the Body of Christ! The evening will feature not only Russ Ramsey, but Andrew Peterson, Sandra McCracken, and Melanie Penn as well. This evening is sure to be a rich collection of songs and stories, and we’d love to have you join us. Advance tickets to this show are sold out, but there will be tickets available at the door for $5. And be sure to check out Russ Ramsey’s brand new book, The Mission of the Body of Christ at the Rabbit Room Store.

When I was in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, a friend got to telling about the neighbors along her block, just off Magazine Street. One of the more memorable characters was a woman who invited the whole street to her sixtieth birthday party—a party that started at 11pm. Another of her neighbors was a young woman who had late-stage cancer. When she was finally done with hospitals and went home to die, her family came down from whatever northern state they lived in and painted her house for her—blue and purple and white with gold trim. “It was so beautiful,” my friend said. “There is a beauty that goes beyond taste.” That phrase stuck with me—”a beauty that goes beyond taste.” For one thing, the phrase exposed me utterly. My first reaction to the purple paint and gold trim on one of those lovely old New Orleans houses was, “How tacky.” But if a dying woman wants purple walls and gold trim, and the people who love her most give them to her, tacky is an odd judgment indeed. I’ve been doing some soul-searching, I don’t mind telling you. There truly is a beauty that goes beyond the narrow confines of taste. That beauty—and our longing for it—is a clue to what it means to be a human being. We are the creatures who make things more beautiful than they have to be. (I’m still thinking about those gorgeous cave paintings from last week’s letter). I have borrowed that language of “making things more beautiful than they have to be” from the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. I recently listened to her conversation with Krista Tippet on the On Being podcast. I commend that episode to you. In it, Gilbert discusses the dangers of thinking of art and creativity as things that only special people do. When you think that way, she says, art “becomes something that isn’t part of daily life; it’s not embroidered within you, not a natural part of you. It’s this artificial thing that you have to go get expensive training in.” We make things more beautiful than they have to be because the world is more beautiful than it has to be. Jonathan Rogers But, as Elizabeth Gilbert points out, no four-year-old boy has ever sat in front of a pile of Legos and said, “I just don’t have the creativity to make anything out of these Legos,” or “I’m not even going to try, because last week I made a Lego sculpture that was so good, I know I couldn’t do so well again today.” If you put crayons and a piece of paper in front of a toddler, she’ll know exactly what to do with them. My friend Andrew Peterson goes on the occasional rant against the noun “creatives,” as used to describe a special class of people. We are all creative, just as surely as we all have a liver. Exercising your creativity makes you more fully human. If that sounds too touchy-feely, let me put it this way: Creativity is one of the most important ways that you engage reality. We make things more beautiful than they have to be because the world is more beautiful than it has to be. “The arts,” by the way, are a relatively small sliver of creativity, and not the most important sliver, either. Any act that brings truth, goodness, or beauty to light is a creative act. Friendship, hospitality, entrepreneurship, gardening, cooking, parenting—these are all acts of creativity (though these, too, represent only a sliver of the whole pie). They all say, “See? this world is more beautiful than you thought.” Which brings me back to Magazine Street. As my wife and I walked up and down those tree-lined blocks in Uptown New Orleans, admiring the beautiful old houses, it was hard to imagine that any one of them might be beautified by purple and gold paint. But there is a beauty that goes beyond taste. It’s true that this world has cancer and hurricanes and crime and corruption. But those aren’t the truest things. Genuine creativity reminds us that the status quo isn’t the same thing as Reality. This world is more beautiful than you thought. If you enjoyed this excellent advice from Jonathan Rogers, consider subscribing to his weekly letter, The Habit, to receive lots more.

Did you watch the Wingfeather Saga animated film and feel deeply moved by the mysterious, enchanting music that helped tell the story? Did you think, “I wonder what that song is—I sure do wish I could listen to it anytime I wanted!” If you answered yes, then today is your lucky day. The soundtrack to the Wingfeather Saga animated film is now available. The soundtrack features the original score, a collaboration between Kurt Heinecke and The Arcadian Wild, as well as original songs by Andrew Peterson and The Arcadian Wild. This film is a feast not only for the eyes and the imagination, but for the ears as well. You can purchase the soundtrack here at the Rabbit Room Store. Happy listening!

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, then chances are you’ve ended up in conversations about culture. At least, I know I have. As a child and teenager, being “in the world, not of it” meant no rated R movies or secular music recorded after sometime in the 80s. (Thankfully, The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel were fine.) As an adult, I realized there was no escaping the world, so I turned to examination and participation. I read books and articles about film, felt super-hip-and-edgy when I convinced myself to like Radiohead, and started noticing the little quirks that made up the American evangelical and homeschool cultures that shaped me. It’s still fun to talk about these things. Chances are, you found your way to The Rabbit Room because talking about the intersections of faith, life, and art is exactly what we do. But are conversations enough? “What is it, exactly, that we are called to do in the world? Are we called to ‘transform culture’ or to ‘change the world’? If we are to be culture makers, where in the world do we begin?” – Andy Crouch, Culture Making Laure Hittle and I will be your hosts as we discuss the meaning of culture, the role our Christian faith plays in it, and how we can make something beautiful and true of the world we’ve been given. If you missed our previous reading groups, here’s what you can expect. For six weeks, we’ll read Culture Making together. Each week, we’ll share a reflection here on The Rabbit Room blog, then offer a up few questions for discussion in the blog comments. We’ll also set up a thread on The Rabbit Room Forums for longer conversations. Here’s the reading schedule (subject to change): Week 1 (8/6): Introduction, Ch 1-2 Week 2 (8/13): Ch 3-5 Week 3 (8/20): Ch 6-8 Week 4 (8/27): Ch 9-11 Week 5 (9/3): Ch 12-14 Week 6 (9/10): Ch 15-16 Culture Making is now available in The Rabbit Room store. Order a copy today, and we’ll see you on August 6th!

We’re proud to announce that Hutchmoot 2018 will feature not one but TWO incredible events. On Thursday, October 4th, Hutchmoot will host Andrew Peterson’s Resurrection Letters live with a full band. This show is free to Hutchmoot registrants and a limited number of seats are available to the public. Then on Friday, October 5th, we are absolutely delighted to be hosting The Tokens Show. A Nashville tradition from Lipscomb University, Tokens celebrates artistic brilliance; critical thinking; and friendship. They have fun, and they make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And themselves. You might think of Tokens as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians, and humorists transgressing borders. But no matter how you define the show, it’s a full evening of music, laughter, and celebration. The Rabbit Room is proud to be hosting them at Hutchmoot 2018. Admission is free to all Hutchmoot registrants and a limited number of seats are available to the public. Visit www.TokensShow.com for more information. Click here for tickets to Andrew Peterson’s Resurrection Letters. Click here for tickets to The Tokens Show. And save 10% when you buy a ticket to both!