over at Mere Orthodoxy Samuel D James writes about Alan Jacobs' book How to Think as the book for our moment ...

https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-to-think-alan-jacobs/

The book is available for pre-order but in spite of having read a couple of things by Alan Jacobs in the last few years I am way, way more likely to pre-order Samurai Jack season 5 and the anime Your Name than a book called How to Think.  It can at least be said of conservatives that they will make no bones at about telling you how you should think about anything and everything.  Not every liberal or leftist is even half as comfortable telling you explicitly how you should think as method or how you should think as conclusion as a conservative, by and large.  In that sense, seeing as this year is the 20th anniversary of South Park, that can go some way to explain why the creators of South Park have said they hate conservatives but they really hate liberals. In a phrase, the liberal of the last thirty years is less likely to be entirely aware of their moralizing sanctimony because they literally cannot imagine why anyone should think differently than they do.  Conservatives, in some sense aware that they don't dominate the priestcraft of contemporary entertainment or academia and aware of it all the time, are less apt to get the impression that everyone already thinks as they do because they wish everyone did.

I know there's advance copies and galley proofs and stuff but the prospect of reading a review of a book that you to pre-order still feels a little weird.  It's hard not to think of the book publishing career of Mark Driscoll since this blog is what it is. 

James was blogging recently about the experience of going tweet-less.  As someone who regards Twitters are mostly a complete waste of time I try to understand as best I can that there are people who use it, find it immensely helpful, and have used it to get information out and engage in some kind of public discourse.  I don't get why they think that's great or necessary but I try to be easy-going about it.  Marketing and propaganda are inextricably part of contemporary experience.  I prefer to approach mass media by way of blogging.  It's easier to blog without a strong sense of urgency but with a developed sense of necessity.  Long time readers, I trust, will understand how and why I take that view.  It's more important to carefully document what I think about specific things than to embrace the fastest hot take possible.  Documenting the rise and fall of a mega-church here in Puget Sound benefited from other people using Twitter, however!  Although at times it's tempting to peruse the Justin Dean book on how good PR can save your church Mars Hill's use of mass media was precisely how this blog was able to so exhaustively document in-process the implosion of what used to be known as Mars Hill Church. 

I've made it clear over the years that I was unimpressed, no, I was negatively impressed with Samuel D. James pious bromides written against watchblogging.  If his lament had been that far too little of what passes itself as watchdog blogging has journalistic or historical rigor then I'd say "Amen", and I've labored over the years to ensure that when this blog has been about church history in Puget Sound it is as accurate and careful as humanly possible.  But it was hard to shake the impression, particularly when James slathered a portrait of Mark, Grace and the Driscoll kids on a blog post about how people should stop picking on Mark Driscoll that this was just an indignant stunt.  Maybe pastors' kids feel obliged to go to bat for each other regardless of questions as to how and why the author of this sort of argument against any First Amendment speech protection for "adult entertainment" should have ever become a pastor to begin with. Consult pages 4 and 5 to get a clearer sense of what Mark Driscoll's idea of working as a professional journalist in college seems to have looked like.

http://content.libraries.wsu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/evergreens/id/118060/show/118047/rec/1

Now, to be fair, there's pretty much no way Samuel D James could have possibly known Mark Driscoll wrote that sort of editorial in college after claiming to have had a conversion experience.  It's not that there's necessarily a reason to just assume Mark Driscoll didn't have some kind of conversion experience, but precisely what Jesus he was converted to has been open to debate over the last twenty years.  And since in the last seven years Driscoll has turned toward regarding men such as T. D. Jakes as friends and publicly claimed he apologized to Joel Osteen for things he said about Osteen a decade ago as of this year, it doesn't seem like James should have selected Mark Driscoll, of all possible self-ordained pastors in America, as the person to go to bat for in saying to not do watchblogs. 

The last piece I recall by Alan Jacobs was about Christian intellectuals and that was an interesting read.  I was also struck by Alastair Roberts' observation at a Mere Fidelity podcast that those Christian intellectuals weren't any kind of evangelical but members of mainline denominations.  Whether or not Mere Orthodoxy can become a kind of conservative Protestant equivalent of First Things remains to be seen, let alone a replacement for the loss of Books & Culture.   What I've written in comments discussions here at my blog as my concern, still being someone who self-identifies as evangelical and also Reformed, is that evangelicals have spent too much time lamenting the loss of an intellectual prestige we have never actually had; worse, too many of us who are evangelicals with intellectual interests have tended to squander our intellectual capital tackling problems that have little discernible relevance to anyone outside our coterie of thought leaders. 

I'm more apt to imagine that The Calvinist International, by being so remorselessly specialist, could get in the zone of what Mere Orthodoxy might hope to achieve but probably can't because, in the end, Mere O keeps relentlessly returning to sex and politics and politics as sex and sex as politics and the usual suspects for social conservatives.  When the cultural mandate is reduced to the necessity of simply making those babies who seem to be assumed to be fulfilling the purpose of the cultural mandate simply by having been brought forth from culture warrior wombs.  There's a jokey axiom in entertainment that you never win the Emmy by going for the Emmy and with that axiom in mind, evangelicalism in Anglo-American contexts is always going for the Emmy and always telling you in the most emphatic ways possible that they are going for the Emmy. 

And yet, as I've dryly joked earlier this month, so much of the Christian cultural and intellectual heritage of the West that evangelicals want to have play a more robust role in public life was formulated by a bunch of guys who took oaths to never get laid.  I am in many respects a stick in the mud but after decades of seeing how social conservatives tend to approach things within American Christianity it seems like they have to figure out whether they're for everybody banging in straight matrimony and making babies or whether the effort to tackle intellectual and cultural issues that go beyond that obsession can actually be taken up. 

Even if everybody that Samuel D James wants to read Alan Jacobs' books goes out and reads it and learns how to think I wonder if the problem won't still be that the sorts of people most eager to read and recommend such a book in the United States are fixated on not just how you should think and what you should think but, along the way, what you should think about.   The gatekeeper castes of the proverbial liberal and conservative mainstreams and the left and right seem to have some anxiety about influence.  The power of the influence in each bubble is not in doubt.  It just seems as though the power of the bubble is too strong in each group. 

I'm at a point now where if somebody gave me a book published by Thomas Nelson my first instinct would be to burn it.  Ever since Mark Driscoll's plagiarism controversy began to be reported as "alleged" in Christian publishing and journalism it's been a little bit tougher to take popular level Christian publishing (whether left, right, or center) seriously.