Community, geography and affinity

I found myself in a variety of social contexts over the last few days that made me think about the nature of community. Scenario one: This past weekend, after church, about a dozen of us went out to eat. We've come to be friends with two other couples in particular who are about our age and are both expecting their first child. So we naturally talked about baby stuff.

Scenario two: On Memorial Day, we had some friends over from our old church for a cookout. These were fellow Gen Xers, also about the same age as us, a mix of singles and marrieds, some of whom we haven't seen for almost two years since we changed churches. None of the others have any kids, and conversation mostly was about current movies and favorite childhood television shows from the 70s and 80s.

Scenario three: Last night, we were at an annual informal wing-ding of publishing industry professionals and friends, many of whom are in town for the Religious Book Trade Exhibit trade show. The attendees included editors, authors, agents, publicists, booksellers, reviewers, journalists, sales reps and other folks in Christian/religious book and magazine publishing. Sort of the Christian literati. Conversation, as you might expect, was about books and publishing and the like.

What strikes me about all these situations is that they are affinity-based communities. Fifty or a hundred years ago, the word "community" was understood in a geographic sense of local neighborhood. The word has shifted to be understood in terms of affinity groups that are not tied to physical geography - people can be part of the arts community or the Asian American community or the evangelical community or the gay/lesbian community or the Star Trek community without being in close geographic proximity to anybody. I am a valued member of the eBay community (or so they tell me), even though I have never physically met anybody I buy from or sell to. One of my authors, Andy Crouch, talks about how this is a significant departure from most of human history. He says that people in most centuries would be astonished to find out that he has more of a sense of community and affinity with people he sees at a conference once a year a thousand miles from his home than he does with the next-door neighbor who's a complete stranger to him.

So my church friends from scenario one all live in different suburbs from me, as do most of my friends from my former church in scenario two - several have a half hour commute to church and a forty-five minute or more commute to work. The publishing industry folks in scenario three are scattered across the country, but several of them I will see more frequently (at various conferences and trade shows through the year) and talk to more often than the neighbors across the street that moved in last year that I still have not said hi to.

I know that theoretically and theologically, community should be diverse and bring me into relationship with people unlike me. But in practice, most of the communities I belong to tend to be of people of similar age, life stage, demographic, vocational and/or personal interests as myself. There are occasions where proximity and geography put me in community with people I would otherwise never talk to, but this tends to be the exception to the rule.

It seems that in suburban contexts, community tends to be affinity-based and self-selecting. We "shop" for our communities and affinity groups just as we shop for consumer goods. So maybe a good spiritual discipline for suburban Christians would be to intentionally seek out relationships and communities beyond our normal affinity groups. Community is easier when there are life experiences or interests in common, but I forget that I already have something in common with every neighbor I have yet to meet - our common humanity.

Publishers Weekly review of The Suburban Christian

The book publishing industry trade journal Publishers Weekly just ran a review of my forthcoming book The Suburban Christian. I think citations of their reviews are supposed to be limited to just twenty-five words, so here's an excerpt:

"[P]rovides a thoughtful critique of what living as a Christian in the suburbs should look like. . . . Every suburban pastor should read this book."

The full review is available here. I was quite pleased to see this review because I think it captures the purpose and flavor of the book quite well. And to provide some context, there are about 178,000 books published in the English language every year. Of those, something like 8,000 to 12,000 of those are religion books of some sort. Of those, PW only selects a couple of hundred religion books for review. So I feel quite honored to get a PW review, especially one as positive as this one.

Never Mind the Joneses!

This weekend was a Lost weekend - we got the first season of Lost from the library, but only had it for three days, so we watched three episodes Friday night, three episodes Saturday night and two episodes on Sunday before we returned it. Great show!

Also this weekend we were in various contexts with other people where I found myself inadvertently comparing our family with others. In one case, I was pleased to see that Josiah has better reading skills than a kid older than him, giving me reason to feel smug and superior. In another case, a baby the same age as Elijah is already walking (whereas Elijah isn't yet), and we heard about other kids who have many more activities and extracurriculars than our kids do. So this left me feeling inadequate and inferior. What to do?

As I was processing all of my thoughts and feelings, I was reminded of the book Never Mind the Joneses by Tim Stafford, who talks about how every family has its own distinct family culture. Some families have a sports culture, others have a musical culture, and so on. He describes how his family is a backpacking family, and some years ago during a rainy hike his daughter was having a miserable time and said, "I hate this! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! And the thing I hate the most is that I know when I grow up I'm going to marry someone just like Dad, and we'll make our kids go backpacking!" Ten years later, while she's not married yet, she has come to love backpacking. It's part of her family's cultural DNA.

Stafford points out that families shouldn't compare themselves to other families' ideals of what a family should look like - they should discern their own particular family culture and seek to live faithfully and Christianly in whatever way God has wired them. So that frees us from comparing ourselves to other families that seem more perfect or more holy or whatnot - we can simply live the lives that we have been given to live, in our own distinct way.

On one level this is helpful to me, especially since suburbia is filled with opportunities to compare ourselves with people more affluent or socially active than us. I can think to myself, "Never mind the Joneses," and just focus on how our family seeks to live and parent and follow God in ways true to us - through frequent trips to the library and evenings on the reading couch (as book publishing professionals, our family culture is a bookish one).

But on the other hand, I'm also tempted to retreat from the world and ignore the Joneses. If hanging out with other families makes me feel envious or arrogant or insecure, then rather than trying to compete with them, I will tend to withdraw and disengage instead. So I end up not being motivated to be in community with others whose very presence or identity makes me feel inadequate. Perhaps this is a spiritual maturity issue on my part, and I just need to get over it. So the challenge is this - how do we "never mind the Joneses" in terms of trying to keep up or copy or compete with others, and yet stay engaged with the Joneses and build community and relationships with the Joneses?

I'd like to think that ideally, in the church, our Christian identity transcends differences in socioeconomic status or demographic differences, but in practice, it's often hard for stay-at-home moms and working moms to not feel threatened or criticized by one another's lifestyles, or for white-collar professionals and blue-collar workers to find common ground. I'm encouraged when I see relationships being built across these kinds of lines, and I'm hopeful that the church can be a place where we don't have to worry about comparing ourselves or competing with each other. But I'm still disturbed to find myself falling into these habits of comparison and competition, which tells me that status is probably still too much of an idolatry in my life.

Quality of community and subverting suburban transience

My friend Helen Lee, coeditor of Growing Healthy Asian American Churches, has a post on her blog describing her experience in suburbia. She notes that when her family moved to one particular suburb, they didn't get to know the neighbors there much at all. They recently moved to another suburb, and in contrast, they found themselves in a community that was very neighborly, rooted and interconnected. This is particularly interesting to me because the latter suburb has a bit of a reputation of being upscale and perhaps snobby/elitist, and if the stereotypes held true, I would have expected Helen to have had a more neighborly experience in the other suburb.

I guess it's a lot like local churches as expressions of larger denominations. Sometimes you think that a particular denomination is liberal or fundamentalist, but the specific local church down the block surprises you by being the opposite, whether evangelically conservative or progressively activist or whatnot. In churches, so much depends on local leadership. And in suburbia, so much depends on the local residents. It's certainly true that some neighborhoods have structural things that either facilitate or inhibit community, but we're called to bloom where we're planted, and a few key people in a neighborhood can make a huge difference in creating a neighborly environment.

Interestingly enough, Helen's post also mentions that she lived in a rural small town for a few years and was quite socially isolated. It's been said that small towns and urban communities have more in common than suburbs, because they maintain a sense of local neighborhood and aren't fragmented by suburban commuter culture and anonymity. On the other hand, it seems like it's often hard for newcomers to feel welcome in small towns, because the existing communities are well-established and transplants can be viewed as a threat to that stability.

This actually makes me wonder if suburban transience is a downside that can be subverted into an opportunity. Many suburbanites are transplants, and that means that communities may be more porous and easier for newcomers to break into, with less of an existing establishment. New residents might actually be more open to new connections and building community, especially in new developments and subdivisions where everybody is in the same boat. Again, to draw a church parallel, sometimes it's easier to start fresh church plants than to renew historic long-term congregations. Not that there aren't challenges either way. At any rate, I'm encouraged by Helen's post, that people are taking initiative and creating community here in suburban Chicagoland.

Suburban factoids

Here's a list of factoids I accumulated about suburbia during the research for my forthcoming book.

• More people live in suburbs than in cities and small towns combined.

• Americans are more likely to work in a suburb, shop in a suburb, and attend recreational events in a suburb than in central cities or rural towns.

• Suburbia is not just families with kids: According to the 2000 census, only 27 percent of suburban households were married couples with kids, outnumbered by young singles and the elderly living alone.

• Suburbia is diverse: The majority of Asian Americans, half of Hispanics and 40 percent of African Americans live in the suburbs. More new immigrants locate in suburbs than in cities.

• Most suburban commuting is not from suburb to city, but from suburb to suburb.

• The average suburban household generates thirteen car trips a day.

• The average American spends 1 hour, 41 minutes in their car each day—a total of more than three weeks a year.

• Each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time reduces community involvement by ten percent.

• The more spread out a suburb, the higher the rates of obesity, high-blood pressure and weight-related chronic illnesses, because we drive more and walk less.

• Big-box stores and national chains return only 13-14% of their dollars to the local community, while locally owned independent stores recirculate 45-58% to the local community.

• Thirty years ago Americans had friends over to their homes 15 times a year; today the figure is half that—just once every month and a half.

Writing in community, In-N-Out Burger and better fast food

This week I was in Los Angeles, meeting with the Catalyst Leadership Forum and the writing team behind the book Growing Healthy Asian American Churches. There's a romantic myth that imagines that books are written by solitary authors who retreat like a hermit into a cabin in the woods, waiting for the muse to speak until they produce a masterpiece. In contrast, this particular book was truly written out of community. The Catalyst Forum met annually from 2002 to 2004, sharing best practices and insights from healthy Asian American churches, writing up one another's stories into chapter drafts, then critiquing and contributing to each other's chapters.

This week we celebrated the book's publication with a dedication service, praying for the book and commissioning it like a missionary to go places we cannot go personally. And then we all autographed each other's copies, like high school yearbooks. It was particularly meaningful that even forum members who had not written actual chapters also signed, since they were part of the community that contributed to the book's writing. It was the first time I had signed books that I had edited, and I was honored to be part of the book's birthing process.

Anyway, much of our time together involved eating, as Asians always do whenever we gather. We had Brazilian barbecue and fresh seafood, and ate lunch in a restaurant's wine cellar (it felt like we were the apostles in a lower room rather than the upper room). But our last meal together before we all departed was at In-N-Out Burger. The forum members from the West Coast told those from other parts of the country that if they have not yet had In-N-Out Burger, they could not leave California without having In-N-Out Burger. So we made our pilgrimage.

If you've read Fast Food Nation or seen Super Size Me, you know that there are plenty of problems with the fast food industry. Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book talks about how several Southeast Asian nations have had skyrocketing rates of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, which were previously unknown in those regions due to healthy, mostly vegetarian diets. The increased health problems correspond almost exactly with the introduction of McDonald's to those nations. It only took twenty years for McDonald's to wreck the healthy eating habits of societies that had had traditional agrarian diets for hundreds of years.

At any rate, besides pursuing alternatives like organic, natural foods and the Slow Food movement, folks have wondered if there are ways to redeem fast food and make it better. And In-N-Out Burger is often held up as one possible role model. In-N-Out makes all their burgers fresh - their ground beef is never frozen, and they use no additives or preservatives. Their fries are made onsite from whole potatoes, cut just before being cooked. Every burger is made to order; they use no microwaves or heat lamps. They also limit their menu to just four items - burgers, fries, shakes and soft drinks. They just do those few things, and they do them well. And their pricing is competitive - a cheeseburger, fries and shake was $5.01, not much different from a McDonald's value meal, and more satisfying to my palate and my conscience.

Interestingly enough, In-N-Out was founded by Christians, and you can still find Bible verses like Proverbs 3:5 and Revelation 3:20 in small print on the burger wrappers and drink cups. I don't know that all that many people have become Christians because of reading a Scripture reference on a burger wrapper, but I still like the idea of supporting a company that has been intentional about having ethical and sustainable business practices. Those of us from around the country may wish that In-N-Out would expand beyond the West Coast, but on the other hand, I think their distinctiveness and charm might be in part because they have kept themselves local. If they grew too big and expanded too far, they might be tempted to compromise their model. I was glad to give In-N-Out my business and to commend it to others. Now I want to find out what like-minded companies are present in my local community so I can support them as well.

Encouragement for aspiring writers

I just got back from a weekend in Columbia, Maryland, where I led a workshop on book publishing for a group from Bridgeway Community Church. Columbia is a suburban community located between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., that was designed to encourage racial and socioeconomic diversity, and Bridgeway reflects that in its demographics. Something else distinctive about Columbia is that commercial signage is not very visible at all. The roads are lined with trees, not billboards. While that can make it difficult to find a grocery store if you don't quite know where it's located, the relative absence of commercial advertising is quite refreshing.

Anyway, I and a colleague had an enjoyable time with about thirty folks, explaining the process of book writing and publishing. One of the handouts I provided included the following quotes I compiled a few years ago:

“First of all, if you want to write, write. And second, don’t do it. It’s the loneliest, most depressing work you can do.” Walker Percy

“Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” Gene Fowler

“Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.” Jessamyn West

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Red Smith

“It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.” Annie Dillard

“In general, very little happens to a writer. Now do you understand why we put so much emphasis on artificial reality? Our actual reality is insufferably dull. A Federal Express delivery is far and away the most dramatic event in my day.” Philip Yancey

“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.” Philip Roth

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” Joseph Heller

“The first draft of anything is [poop].” Ernest Hemingway

“Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you’re going to say.” Francoise Sagan

“Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult.” Stephen Leacock

“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” Graham Greene

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing a new way or to say a new thing an old way.” Richard Harding Davis

The Contented Soul, by Lisa Graham McMinn

I just read The Contented Soul: The Art of Savoring Life, by Lisa Graham McMinn. The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which lauded it as "an excellent guide to spiritual practice . . . this book will especially delight those interested in understanding how inner peace is vitally connected to peace in the exterior world." The book provides substantive content and is elegantly written. McMinn, a sociologist at Wheaton College (and about to depart for George Fox) uses the tools of her discipline to help readers understand why contentment is elusive for many of us and what forces militate against contentment.

She traces how society has shifted us from understanding ourselves as soul (spiritual being in relationship with God) to self (as autonomous, self-determining psyche in pursuit of self-actualization and self-fulfillment) and ultimately to consumer. Along the way contentment shifted from being an internal state dependent on our connection to God to an external state dependent on our consumer purchases and acquisitions.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that she is writing as a suburban Christian in the context of a suburban environment. While she is not offering a study of suburbia per se, her analysis and insights give concrete ways to live Christianly and contentedly in suburbia. While her book is not a self-help book, it is full of examples and illustrations of what the contented Christian (and suburban) life might look like.

For instance, McMinn retrieves an old chair from someone’s curbside and restores it, recovering functional use and aesthetic value while countering consumerism. She hangs clothes on a traditional outdoor clothesline, saving energy and inspiring neighbors to do the same. She grows her own vegetables, buys from local farmers’ markets, commends the Slow Food movement, practices sabbath and voluntary simplicity, promotes economic justice and supports handcraft stores like Ten Thousand Villages that work toward sustainable living for people around the world.

Yet the book is not a prescriptive how-to book about things to do to find contentment. Rather, with a sociologist’s eye, she provides a descriptive portrait of the contented soul and shows us that life is better when we sip and savor life slowly, when we leave a smaller ecological footprint, when we embrace our limits and avoid getting sucked into the lies of consumer culture and western individualism. I came away from the book inspired to be the kind of person who cultivates contentment and experiences God’s goodness and shalom right here in my suburban environment – and also works to extend shalom and contentment to others.

Community theatre and Schoolhouse Rock

Ellen and I are fans of live theatre. We were both in high school theatre – she was the female lead in Brigadoon, and I had thirteen words (that’s words, not lines) in Look Homeward, Angel. One of the reasons we started dating was that we both love musicals, and during our courtship we saw Miss Saigon, Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables and the Chicago production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat starring Donny Osmond. It’s harder for us to catch community theatre these days now that we have kids, but we still enjoy live stage when we can. There’s just something about the medium that is so much more immediate and incarnational than what is viewed on a screen. I love the fact that we share the actual space, time and air with the actors, who may well be local residents and neighbors.

Our local community theatre company, Grove Players, is currently doing a production of Schoolhouse Rock Live! based on the Saturday morning children’s TV segments that aired on ABC in the ’70s. I missed the Chicago production that ran about a decade ago, so I was thrilled that the show would be here in my own local suburb. We got tickets for a Sunday afternoon matinee and spent the weekend prepping Josiah for the show by watching our Schoolhouse Rock DVD so he would be familiar with all the classic songs, from “I’m Just a Bill” and “Conjunction Junction” to “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here” and “A Noun Is a Person, Place or Thing.”

The show had a cast of 27 kids, ages eight to fifteen. Part of me was disappointed that it was not cast with Gen Xers like myself who experienced the original Schoolhouse Rock segments. But it was still a joy to watch a new generation encounter and present these songs, many of which are quite lyrically challenging, like “Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla” about pronouns and “The Preamble” of the Constitution. Josiah and Elijah were very well behaved and sat attentively during the hour and a half show. Afterward I asked Josiah what his favorite song was, and he said, “All of them.”

It was interesting how well the songs held up three decades after their original airing. The music, a mix of folk, jazz and pop rock, is as fun today as it was when I was a kid. Because five of the six main cast members were girls, they changed a few gender references – the man with the boyish face in “Unpack Your Adjectives” became a woman with a girlish face, and the future astronaut in “Interplanet Janet” was also revised as a woman. At the time the song was written, before astronauts Sally Ride and Christa McAuliffe, it might have been assumed that only men could be astronauts. To its credit, Schoolhouse Rock has long championed women’s rights with the disco-hip anthem “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage.” (Josiah said, “That’s a fun one.”)

While the multiplication and grammar songs felt timeless, the history pieces seemed to offer too rosy a view of American history, from its celebration of manifest destiny in “Elbow Room” (with no mention of the impact on Native Americans) and a Eurocentric view of immigration in “The Great American Melting Pot.” The history segments were produced for the bicentennial in 1976, and perhaps the producers were hoping to recapture a more positive vision of America after the recent disillusionments of Vietnam and Watergate. It’s telling that there’s no Schoolhouse Rock song about slavery or the Civil War.

Then again, Schoolhouse Rock may actually offer a particular prophetic word to our local suburban context. I was nostalgically enjoying all the songs and music until “The Great American Melting Pot” came on. That’s when I realized that the entire cast of the show was white. While the original animated segment included Chinese, African, Mexican and other national and ethnic heritages as well as European, there was some cognitive dissonance having an all-white cast celebrating America’s diversity. Downers Grove and its surrounding suburbs are majority white, but not all white. Perhaps this says something not merely about suburban racial and ethnic demographics but also about who tends to have resources and access to arts programs.

The arts reflect our culture and can expose and critique our blind spots. I’m grateful that local community organizations support community theatre. I also hope that suburban arts programs will not merely be mirrors of affluent whites that are the primary patrons of the arts, but will also reflect the breadth and diversity of all of the community’s residents.

At any rate, Josiah went to bed last night singing, "Conjunction Junction - what's your function?" And remember - interjections show excitement or emotion. They’re generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point, or by a comma if the feeling’s not as strong.

(Darn! That’s the end.)

TV Turnoff Week

This week is TV Turnoff Week, and we're trying to figure out if this applies only to new programming on broadcast TV or if it includes using the TV to watch DVDs and videos. We rarely watch TV as it is, though Josiah will watch educational kids' shows occasionally. (He wrote "PBS Kids" on his MagnaDoodle a few weeks ago. Brand awareness and loyalty sets in early.) The average American watches three or four hours of TV every day, and many households have the TV on each day for seven or more cumulative hours.

I realized a few years ago that the main reason I don't watch much TV is that it's so much more obviously a commercial/consumer medium than things like movies or books. I'm glad that novels aren't interrupted by pages of ads between chapters. Almost twenty minutes of an hour of TV now consists of commercials, which is double the amount that it was a few decades ago. Commercial sponsorship of TV is nothing new, but it just feels increasingly intrusive, as advertisers try to circumvent TiVo with product placement during the actual programming.

I'm also annoyed by the neverending nature of TV programming, especially when teasers for the next show entice Josiah to sit through the next half hour, and the next. We think he's a J on the Myers-Briggs, so he will (sometimes, not always) turn off the TV on his own when the closing credits roll if we have told him ahead of time to do so. But woe to us if we try to get him to leave a show in the middle of the episode! He likes closure.

We've also never been able to follow more than a couple of TV shows at a time; it's like we only have a capacity to build relationships with so many characters and storylines before we max out. We used to watch Friends and ER back in the 90s, and occasionally dipped into The X-Files, but tried to avoid falling into the weekly routine with an indefinite number of shows. The only way we watch TV shows now is via DVD, which allows us linear, sequential completion and the autonomy to watch as much or little as we want when we want (or whenever the discs come in from the library).

We are currently on season 3 of both Alias and Smallville, and Josiah and I recently watched season 2 of the original 80s Transformers cartoons. Part of me is thrilled that Josiah is enjoying the shows that I loved as a kid, but I'm also a bit conflicted over the fact that they're essentially half-hour long commercials for the toys. Thus far Josiah has just played with my old Transformers (and broken several) and not clamored to buy new ones, but I know I need to beware of the synergy between television and consumption. We already own way more Blue's Clues items than I ever thought imaginable.

But at least Josiah seems to understand the concept behind TV Turnoff Week. This morning he said, "It's a TV-off day?" That's right, no TV today. "Okay. No TV." Whew.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

As I mentioned in my previous post, these days we get basically all our movies and DVDs from the library. One that just came our way via interlibrary loan that we watched last night was the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. This film surveys the economic and environmental impact of Wal-Mart on local communities, the lived realities of Wal-Mart's employees and factory workers, and much more. It reinforced my understanding of Wal-Mart as perhaps the ultimate expression of the law of unintended consequences - initially good principles of thrift and cost-saving, taken to global extremes, results in exploitation and harm to workers.

One segment featured a coalition of local community residents and activists that worked together to keep Wal-Mart from building in their area. Interestingly enough, this had the most directly Christian critique of Wal-Mart. Local pastors and church leaders studied Wal-Mart's impact on communities and concluded that for them as Christians, social justice and care for the poor meant lobbying against Wal-Mart. They saw Christian responsibility not in terms of free market capitalism or economic bargain-hunting, but in terms of protecting the least of these by opposing Wal-Mart.

After reading an article in Christianity Today a while back about Wal-Mart, I've mitigated my position somewhat from a knee-jerk "Wal-Mart is evil" stance to more of a "Wal-Mart is a fallen institution." There is certainly much about Wal-Mart that is well-intentioned, but ultimately, the effects of their business practices seem beyond redemption. And I'm sure it's not just Wal-Mart - virtually every discount retailer probably has some business practices that profiteer on low-wage employees and factory workers. But Wal-Mart's sheer size and legendary ruthlessness makes them far more damaging in their impact than basically all other discount retailers combined.

Anyway, all this to say - see this movie. Like Super Size Me or The Corporation, it's a documentary that has the potential to change how you participate in consumer culture. (And the spoof commercials are hilarious!)

In praise of public libraries

I’m an editor/author/former church librarian/all-around book geek, so one of the most gratifying things for me as a parent is when my four-year-old son says, “Let’s go to the library. We can check out lots of books.” We typically go to the library at least once a week, and we always come home with stacks of stuff. Right now Josiah is in a Curious George phase, and his bedtime routine last night included ten Curious George books.

Our local public library has been ranked one of the top ten public libraries in the nation for its size. A few years ago, we decided to move just two blocks from our old house not only because we wanted to stay in the local community, but also because we wanted to keep the same home library.

Why do I love our library? Let me count the ways. Online catalog access, which lets us check due dates, reserve books and renew items. Interlibrary loan, through which we can get nearly any book or DVD available in the state of Illinois at no cost. A fantastic children’s department that includes a train table and all sorts of educational toys. Computers where kids can play educational games, with adjacent computers for parents so I can check the status of eBay auctions while Josiah is playing Bob the Builder. A large collection of DVDs, CDs, periodicals and comic books/graphic novels. We can even check out LeapPad books and cartridges.

Libraries are kind of a mind-boggling concept, if you think about it – I can’t think of any other industry or category of items that has library equivalents. It’s not like you can go somewhere and borrow dress shirts or khakis, or check out a set of dishes or silverware for a few weeks. Just about everything else in our economy is based on commodity exchange, the buying and selling of goods and products. Libraries stand alone in sharing resources with a community. A library’s books and resources are the communally owned property of the community around it. That’s a countercultural concept in our privatistic consumer culture that says that all of us need to buy everything individually for ourselves.

The library helps hold my consumerism in check. Whereas my default setting was to buy every book that ever caught my fancy, in recent years I’ve learned that I do not need to personally own everything I want to read. Nor do I necessarily need to have everything right away. Our library essentially works like Netflix for free; a book or DVD might arrive months after I reserve it, and that’s okay. We haven’t rented a movie in years.

In addition, the library is one of the few civic meeting spaces where the local community gathers and interacts. Besides hosting numerous reading groups, workshops, seminars and toddler story times, the library is also a meeting place for community issues. Our suburb, like many in the area, has had increasing numbers of housing teardowns in recent years, and the library hosted forums where people could hear the pros and cons of teardowns and their impact on our community. The library is one of the few remaining noncommercial public square “third places” where people can connect and build social capital.

I am a beneficiary of a suburban community that has had a history of strong support for the local library. I overheard someone saying that a resident donated $25,000 to jumpstart the library’s DVD holdings. In a recent local election, an item on the ballot would have changed how the village makes its budgetary decisions, and one of the main reasons it was voted down was that it might have significantly reduced funding for the library. We love our library. It’s a matter of civic pride.

But I know that not every community has a library like ours. Libraries have varying amounts of resources available to them, depending on local population and funding and whatnot. Many municipalities have needed to cut library budgets to provide for schools and other public priorities. As a result, bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble have in many ways become library alternatives, often intentionally replicating and replacing some of the civic functions that libraries used to provide.

As a book publishing professional, I’m happy to have people encounter books anywhere, whether in the commercial environment of a bookstore or in the public space of a library. Indeed, our public library is adjacent to a local bookshop, and they even share the same parking lot. Even as I encourage people to support their local bookstore, I also encourage them to support their local library. If you haven’t stopped by your library for a while, drop in and browse. Pick up a book by an author you’ve never heard of before, or a genre that you rarely read. Look at the community notices on the bulletin boards. And thank a librarian on your way out. Not only do they help individuals think and grow, they provide civic health to the whole community.

Suburban Q & A (Part 2)

Here's the second part of the interview about my forthcoming book. (Yes, I broke it up into two posts not only because it was long but also so I could have an easy thing to post in case I couldn't think of anything else this week.)

Is it selfish for Christians to live in suburbia?

Hsu: Well, God needs Christians in suburbia just like he needs Christians everywhere. There's a difference between a self-centered suburbanism that gets sucked into all the materialism and consumerism, and an other-centered Christian suburbanism that focuses on how to herald the kingdom of God in the suburbs. Christians shouldn't abandon the suburbs; they should redeem them and make them better places to live.

Does ministry to suburbs mean that we don't care about cities?

Hsu: Some people pit the suburbs against the cities, but I don't think it's an either/or. It's a both-and. Suburban Christians need to see their suburb as part of a metropolitan whole. In Jeremiah, God calls us to seek the welfare of the city we live in. That means not just caring for our local suburbs but also the larger urban metropolis. Care for the suburbs means care for the city, and vice versa.

How can suburban Christians seek the welfare of the city?

Hsu: I think suburban Christians and churches need to have three spheres of ministry focus--suburban, urban and global. Start with your local suburban community and meet needs there. But also look to the larger urban metropolis that your suburb is a part of and partner with ministries to the larger city. And then you have international, global missions. A lot of suburban churches do the local and the global but skip the urban in between; they might support missionaries in Africa or Asia but not ministries in Chicago or Toronto. A balanced church ministers to all three--suburban, urban and global.

How can suburban churches minister to their communities?

Hsu: Sociologists have said that America needs a "third place," outside of the first two places of home and work. We've lost the civic gathering places and public squares where people used to meet and connect. That's why coffeehouses like Starbucks did so well in the 90s--they filled that vacuum with places for people to meet. But really, the third place should be the church! Suburban churches can be civic places that are open to their communities. You don't have to have a food court or espresso bar to do this. Any church with Sunday school classrooms can open themselves to other organizations to meet in their buildings, Girl Scouts, Al-Anon, whatever.

What does it mean to be a suburban Christian?

Hsu: Being a suburban Christian means that even though suburbia can be an anonymous, materialistic, consumerist environment, we intentionally live in ways that promote community, generosity, simplicity and civic good. It means that we look for ways to love our suburban neighbor as ourselves. It's the same thing that Christians are called to do wherever they live, and that we see suburbia as a place where we can exhibit God's grace and mercy to all who live here.

Suburban community - for a price

Someone gave me a copy of the article "Backlash in the Burbs," by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, from the September/October 2005 issue of Psychology Today. It's a profile of Ladera Ranch, a new suburban development in Orange County, California, that's an intelligently designed mixed-use suburban community based on the principles of the Congress for New Urbanism. The physical geography of the community is designed to maximize neighborly interaction and civic involvement. Houses are close to each other and have porches in front and garages in the back. Interconnected streets and broad sidewalks are designed to be walkable and facilitate use of parks and green space.

Six salaried event planners organize community functions - holiday parties and decorating contests, movies in the park, block parties and barbecues. A community services organization provides "event in a box" resources to help residents plan activities. Lareda has over 75 resident-organized clubs and activities, from book clubs and scrapbooking to groups for computer junkies or divorced moms. Residents describe their experience like living on a stationary cruise ship, or college dorm life - "Leisure World for thirtysomethings," says one resident. Neighbors go on walks together and invite each other over to dinner, even if they just met at the park. There's always something going on.

Sounds great! What's the catch? Well, a four-bedroom colonial house in Lareda starts at nearly $1 million. It only goes up from there. Essentially, if you can pay, you can play. Suburbia is a commercial environment, and all the more so when you are paying for the amenities of a cruise-ship-like community. Southern California is different from much of the country in terms of housing costs, but even so, the financial investment needed to live in this kind of community is prohibitive for many.

Of course, there are plenty of people who spend that much money for suburban housing but live their lives in privacy and seclusion from their neighbors. Despite the price tag, Ladera's vision of a socially connective suburban community is commendable in that it encourages people to look beyond themselves and their own nuclear families. I suspect the next step, then, would be to extend that vision beyond their subdivision's boundaries. I would hope that residents would not only make their community a happy enclave for those who can afford to live there, but turn their focus outward as well. Not just community for themselves, but community service and development for others.

Richards's article also points out that by no means is fun civic housing a cure-all for personal issues. One researcher says that people are drawn to new developments because they are marketed as a way to start fresh. "They move to solve their problems but that doesn't happen." Richards writes, "Marriages don't automatically get better, and isolated people may still feel lonely. Disillusionment sets in when residents slowly realize that 'a development is in fact just a collection of houses and not a magic salve.'" In other words, a friendly civic environment can facilitate community interaction and social neighborliness, but it won't necessarily fix you. Christians living in affluent communities like Ladera have the opportunity to minister to neighbors with deep spiritual needs unfulfilled by activities and events.

While only a small percentage of the population can afford to live in New Urbanist communities like Ladera, all of us can work toward community involvement and social interaction wherever we live. Certainly it's not just communities that can afford event planners that can have interactive community spirit. The larger challenge, I think, is for Christians in ordinary suburban communities to find ways to foster community and social interaction in their neighborhoods. It could be that my neighborhood's geography or infrastructure hinders me from getting to know my neighbors. Or I might just need to get off my duff and attend our neighborhood association meetings.

Suburban Q & A (Part 1 - commuter culture, etc.)

An interview with me about my forthcoming book has now been posted on IVP's website. It's a little long, so here's half of it:

Why a book on suburbia?

Albert Hsu: Over half the population lives in suburbia. Our country used to be half urban and half rural, but suburbia has expanded so much that just about a quarter still live in big cities and less than that in small towns. Suburbia may be one of the most significant mission fields of the twenty-first century.

You say that the suburban life is a spiritual quest. What do you mean by this?

Hsu: When people describe suburbia, they always say that it's a good place to have kids and raise a family. In other words, it's the place of their hopes and dreams for their futures. These are spiritual longings. People come to suburbia looking for a fresh start, for new jobs or relationships or communities. Even if they're in suburbia for the wrong reasons, like materialism or fear of racial diversity, these still point to spiritual needs.

So is suburbia a good thing or a bad thing?

Hsu: It's both. Back during the industrial revolution, people lived in overcrowded urban slums in the shadow of factory smokestacks, and it was dangerous. It was a public health hazard. People were at risk at home and at work. When suburbs were developed, people were able to live away from industrial areas and have better living conditions. But an unintended consequence of suburban living is that people no longer lived in the same area that they worked in. It created a commuter culture.

You write that suburbia shapes us for good and for bad. Can you give an example?

Hsu: Suburbs are designed with cars in mind. That's how the geographic land-use patterns are designed. You can't really get anywhere in suburbia by walking--things are spread too far out. Many areas don't even have sidewalks. This suburban commuter culture fragments us--we live in one suburb and work half an hour away in a different suburb and go to church in yet another suburb. So our lives are fragmented into different communities that don't overlap.

What can we do to counter commuter culture?

Hsu: Besides walking more and biking more, we can recover a parish concept. People used to think in terms of neighborhood parishes, with work, school, church, the corner store all within walking distance, and you'd see the same people in the same community. It's harder to do that now in suburbia, but try to focus on a five-mile radius of your house. Try to work near your home and go to a church near your home. Consolidate your life so you live, work, shop and worship all in the same area. You'll spend less time commuting and have more opportunities to invest in the local community.

Alternatives to “What did you do this weekend?”

It’s Monday morning, which means that my coworkers and I go through our usual informal ritual of asking each other, “So what did you do this weekend?” Kind of like folks checking in at the beginning of a small group. This particular weekend was rather full. Friday night Ellen and I went out for a dinner-and-a-movie date for the first time in two months (yes, since before Valentine’s Day!). We tried out a local cafe that had great bread, and we were late to the theatre so instead of seeing Syriana as we had planned, we caught Nanny McPhee, a surprisingly delightful family/romantic comedy starring Emma Thompson and Colin Firth.

Then Saturday morning we went to Elijah’s two-and-under playgroup at Gigi’s Playhouse Too, and then that afternoon went to church early to rehearse because Ellen and I were leading worship. (Our church meets on Saturday evenings.) After the service we had dinner with a church dinner group, which went until about ten, when someone remembered Daylight Saving Time, instantly making it an even later night than we had thought. And on Sunday we had another dinner group, this one with three other families with children with Down syndrome. It was our first gathering, and great fun was had by kids and adults alike. Except when we were taking pictures of the kids, Elijah thwocked Abby in the face, and she started to cry, which set off Matthew . . . anyway, Josiah and Elijah both fell asleep on the way home, earlier than usual bedtimes, which meant that Ellen and I could watch the DVD of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was okay but not as good as the book nor movies two and three.

As I recount all this, it seems that having a packed, busy weekend schedule is something of a badge of honor. We feel better about having lots of stuff to say when asked, “What did you do this weekend?” Of course, this Monday morning recapitulation just reaffirms our frenetic busyness. Now I’m wondering if there are alternative questions that wouldn’t reinforce this emphasis on doing.

I can’t remember where I read this now, but I came across something about how people in some area of the country, perhaps Colorado or somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, rarely ask, “What did you do this weekend?” For them, the usual question instead is “So where did you go this weekend?” They live in a region where the cultural norm is that everybody goes off to a mountain or park to ski or hike or climb. There’s so much to explore that it’s assumed that everybody gets out of town. Of course, this is still a variation on the doing question, but I like the emphasis on physical geography. It’s probably much more interesting a question for that context – around here, the answer would be, “Let’s see. Friday we went to Naperville. Saturday we went to Plainfield, West Chicago and Winfield. Sunday we went to Woodridge. Wahoo!”

More interesting questions for our suburban context might be:

· “What did you think about this weekend?”
· “What communities were you a part of this weekend?”
· “What relationships did you cultivate this weekend?”
· “What did you read this weekend?”
· “What did you observe about your kids/friends/etc. this weekend?”
· “What was spiritually significant about your weekend?”
· “What was most restful about your weekend?”
· “How did you experience sabbath this weekend?”

If we asked each other these kinds of questions on Monday mornings, our answers would be quite different. I might realize that the most important thing about my weekend was the two-hour nap I took Sunday afternoon. Or that my highlight was when Josiah, after worship, on his own initiative and all by himself, moved the piano bench across the sanctuary to where it was supposed to go and said, “I’m a good helper.” Maybe I’ll try to phrase my Monday morning check-in questions in such a way that allow for the answers to be less about doing and more about being, reflecting, connecting and resting.

Mediums and messages: Books, movies, Narnia and Calvin & Hobbes

A few months ago, a column by the editor of Publishers Weekly made an observation about the challenges facing movie adaptations of books. She pointed out that very rarely do movie versions of literary novels please their reading fans:

With the exceptions of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird and the recent Mystic River, I can't think of a movie that I loved as much as a book. On occasion, of course, a not very good book becomes a good movie—Bridges of Madison County, anyone? How about The Horse Whisperer?—and frankly, I think that's why: they weren't such great books in the first place, so the filmmakers had nowhere to go but up. That, and the fact that it's easier to add filmic nuance to a simplistic book than to subtract it from a complicated one.

Then in the Feb. 2006 issue of Christianity Today, Wheaton College communication professor E. J. Park wrote a terrific article, “A Tale of Two Kitties,” in which he contrasts Aslan’s representation in the Narnia movie and Hobbes from the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. Park points out that Aslan’s portrayal in Lewis’s book as “not a tame lion” is somehow incongruous with the movie merchandising of Aslan Happy Meal figurines and Aslan plush toys, which seem like very tame lions indeed.

In contrast, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, has never allowed Calvin or Hobbes to be licensed or made into ancillary products. No Hobbes plush toys or Calvin backpacks or lunchboxes. (The Calvin window decals on many back windshields are illegal copyright infringements.) Thus Watterson has preserved the integrity of his comic characters by keeping them only within the medium of comic strips. Park quotes Watterson:

"My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships. Who would believe in the innocence of a little kid and his tiger if they cashed in on their popularity to sell overpriced knickknacks that nobody needs? Who would trust the honesty of the strip's observations when the characters are hired out as advertising hucksters?"

All this reminds me of my coursework in communication and media theory and Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Communication media, whether books or movies or blogs or podcasts, are not neutral – by their very nature, they are able to do or not do certain things well or at all. When content is shifted from one medium to another, like a movie version of a superhero narrative or a children’s book version of a Disney movie, forces are at work that change the qualitative experience of that content.

Thus, as many reviewers have pointed out, the weakest aspect of the recent Narnia movie was actually the portrayal of Aslan. In readers’ imaginations he was free to roam wild. But Aslan on the silver screen instead seemed tepid and tame, with a diminished sense of space and presence, able to be contained by a mere tent, limited by the scope of CGI and Liam Neeson’s voicing. Even Mufasa in The Lion King seemed to have more powerful establishing shots than Aslan did in Narnia. This is not to say that the movie was a bad one, or that another movie could not have done better with Aslan. It’s just that Aslan’s depiction in particular was one of the elements lost in this specific translation between media.

I’m all for good books and good movies, and for good movies based on good books, as rare as that might be. (The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and the film version starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, is one of the rare examples that is equally excellent in both book and film form.) But the above-cited articles remind me of the dangers inherent to crossing media, especially in product licensing and commodification. So I am pleased that Calvin & Hobbes is not going to be merchandised or adapted into movies or knickknacks, and I am happy to recommend The Complete Calvin & Hobbes as the definitive collection of Watterson’s work, preserved in a medium consistent with the message as originally intended.

The Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman

My wife and I decided a few years ago to not shop at Wal-Mart, primarily because of a Fast Company article we read called “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know” that highlighted the detrimental local and global effects of Wal-Mart’s business practices. The author of that article, Charles Fishman, has now published a book, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works—and How It’s Transforming the American Economy. (One chapter is excerpted as an article available on Fast Company’s website, “The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart.”)

In short, Fishman’s book is meticulously researched and documented, thoroughly readable and accessible, extremely fair and balanced in its perspective, and devastating in its analysis and critique. This is no mere hatchet job on Wal-Mart – it’s a methodical, painstaking and careful study of all the questions that Wal-Mart raises. Some sample issues:

Does Wal-Mart actually create jobs in a community, or does it kill off existing businesses and jobs? Both. A new Wal-Mart may hire 300 people, but on average, 250 people at nearby businesses will lose their jobs, and about four local businesses will close. A Wal-Mart not only siphons business away from other merchandise retailers, it also impacts service and repair businesses, as it becomes cheaper to buy new ones than repair them. Wal-Mart’s cheapness of products contributes to a throw-away society.

What is Wal-Mart’s effect on local communities? A study of Iowan small towns showed that restaurants near Wal-Marts had 3% increases in business, probably because of increased traffic. But nearby towns without Wal-Marts lost 47% of their retail sales, as customers drove out of town to shop at Wal-Mart. During the period that Iowa went from no Wal-Marts to 45 Wal-Marts, 43% of men’s/boys’ clothing stores in Iowa went out of business.

Wal-Mart demands that suppliers reduce their costs and lower their prices, which in turn reduces margins for suppliers. A company that does 10% or less of their business with Wal-Mart has an average profit margin of 12.7%, but one that does 25% or more of their business with Wal-Mart has a margin of 7.3%. And Wal-Mart’s pricing demands have cannibalized markets, becoming the downfall of dozens of vendors – Vlasic pickles and Levi’s jeans are just two of many examples Fishman highlights in the book.

More significantly, from a global justice perspective, Wal-Mart’s business practices lead to overseas manufacturing that is poorly monitored and prone to countless human rights and labor abuses. In order for companies to provide products at low enough a price to satisfy Wal-Mart’s demands, factory workers are forced to work fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. A factory worker in Bangladesh was beaten with the pants she was making when she didn’t make production quotas. Fishman makes the point that Wal-Mart’s customers are buying pants that were literally used to beat the people who made them.

Wal-Mart’s sheer size makes it an unparalleled force for either good or ill, and Fishman argues that it has not yet wielded its might in ways that promote human rights or environmental stewardship. It has only used its power to squeeze every possible economic efficiency out of suppliers and workers. Its bottom line of “everyday low prices” means that it does not provide adequate health care insurance for its workers, outsourcing health-care costs onto the government. It means that workers are forced to work overtime without pay or locked in stores overnight. It means that suppliers and factories are not encouraged to have safety or quality controls because such safeguards would add costs to their systems.

All this (and much, much more) reinforces my conviction never to shop at Wal-Mart again. True, I have little sense if other retailers have similar, if smaller, impacts. What would be really useful would be if all retailers and suppliers had far more information available about their labor and manufacturing conditions, and whether purchasing those products are ultimately helpful or harmful. Maybe some day we’ll be able to identify fair-trade toilet paper and toothpaste the way we can now identify fair-trade coffee, and regulators and watchdog groups can enable our consumer choices to be more just. But until then, for me and my family, conscientious shopping means that we vote with our shopping carts and shop at stores other than Wal-Mart.

Letting magazine subscriptions lapse

This week I got my final issue of U.S. News & World Report. I’ve been a faithful subscriber for twenty-two years, since 1984, when my sixth-grade class used the weekly news magazine for current events and news quizzes. After more than two decades and a thousand issues of coverage of national politics, international disasters, college rankings and tech guides, I finally decided to let my subscription lapse, as an effort to simplify my life.

I’ve always been a fairly heavy consumer of news media and periodicals. In my grad school program for communications, one of our assigned texts was The New York Times, which we were required to subscribe to and read daily for a semester. I also read the Chicago Tribune simultaneously to compare coverage. A few years later, as a print publicist, I worked with book review editors at various magazines, and so I was constantly reading dozens of magazines every week, from Christianity Today and Books & Culture to World, Discipleship Journal, Commonweal, First Things and Christian Century. In recent years we’ve had (mostly free) subscriptions to an eclectic range of magazines including Wired and Fast Company, the Utne Reader and Sierra magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, Men’s Journal and Budget Living. This is on top of keeping up with publishing trade journals at work like Publishers Weekly and Copy Editor.

As many folks have observed, you can tell a lot about somebody by what magazines are on the coffee table. Each of these magazines says something about my sense of self and identity—who I think I am, who I aspire to be. Some reflect our stage of life; we started getting Parents and Working Mother once we had kids. When I got some free subscriptions, I chose Saveur and Outdoor Photographer not because I have any real skill as a cook or photographer, but they were areas that I thought it might be interesting to learn more about, even if I never actually gained any culinary or photographic expertise. My wife has been far more consistent in her magazine readership; her only subscription is to Worship Leader, which reflects that she has a far more singular and clear sense of her identity than I do, with my scattershot variety of nominal interests.

I’ve always had dozens of magazines circulate through my life in any given month, but recently I’ve been learning to let subscriptions lapse. After all, this is a lot of time spent reading magazines that could be used doing other things, and too many of these magazines appeal to particular consumerist identities. So cutting out magazines is a way of reducing exposure to unnecessary advertising messages, as well as recentering myself away from external false selves. For media-immersive junkies like me, fasting from periodicals is a healthy spiritual discipline to practice.

But even as I say this, Chicago Public Radio is offering free subscriptions to Newsweek for their pledge drive, and now that I don’t get U.S. News anymore, I’m really tempted . . .

Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, by Judith Levine

I just read Judith Levine’s Not Buying It, an interesting chronicle of one New Yorker’s attempt to live without shopping for a full year. She adapts the principle behind Buy Nothing Day (as Adbusters has decreed the day after Thanksgiving) and applied it to a whole year. For calendar year 2004, she and her partner, Paul, don’t go out to eat, don’t see new movies, and try not to buy anything apart from food and basic supplies. The experiment raises difficult questions of what is essential and what is unnecessary. Are Kleenex a luxury when you can use toilet paper or handkerchiefs? Is toilet paper a luxury when millions of people around the world do without it? Levine decides that Q-Tips don’t make the cut.

Levine is a skier, and she has some interesting episodes where her consumer identity clashes with her skier identity. For example, she got used to skiing with specialized $15 SmartWool socks, and she was impressed enough with their performance that she buys a whole line of related clothing. One day she can’t find her SmartWool socks and decides that she’d rather stay home and sulk than ski with ordinary socks. Later on she realizes the inanity of that action, since she had skied for years perfectly well without specialized socks. Somehow her loyalty to a particular brand name consumer product trumped her desire to enjoy a day of skiing.

She also includes an amusing episode where she is skiing with two friends, and despite the friendly community, she begins to covet her friends’ skis, boots, bindings and the like. She immediately feels like she needs to buy newer stuff to keep up with them. After all, their legs and buns seem more toned than her own, and maybe if she bought the latest equipment (next year), her own buns would be in better shape. Levine later realizes that maybe this is why the Ten Commandments say that you should not covet your neighbor’s house, servant, ox—or ass.

While not written from a particularly religious perspective, Levine’s book is insightful, with good examples and applications for suburban Christians. She makes more use of the public library and reads books that she already owns but has never gotten around to. She makes healthier meals since she is not buying preprocessed stuff or eating out. Instead of buying a graduation gift for her niece, she gives her a family necklace that had been passed on to her from her mother. Time not spent going to movies means more time free for museums, poetry readings, community events and civic involvement. Levine paid off her $7956.21 credit card bill by June, and at the end of the year calculated that she spent about $8000 less in 2004 than she had in 2003.

Particularly convicting, to me, at least, are the episodes where she realizes that she wants to read the newest books and see the latest movies not necessarily for their content, but simply because they are new. After all, keeping current with the latest media give her social cachet among her friends. This makes me wonder if my own preoccupation with new books (including this one!) is unhealthy. Even if I get them from the library rather than buy them, isn’t that still an act of consumption?

It occurs to me that for Christians, this giving up of consumption is a practice of the spiritual discipline of simplicity. It would be entirely appropriate for Christians to adopt a similar pattern for Lent, or at least ask the tough questions about how much of our consumption is necessary. If a secular Jewish atheist like Levine can give up shopping for a year, then shouldn’t Christians be able to give it up for seven weeks? Hmmm. Maybe next year.

Sprawl: A Compact History, by Robert Bruegmann

I recently read Robert Bruegmann’s book Sprawl: A Compact History, which serves as something of a contrarian voice in all the current literature about suburbia. I’ve already returned it to the library, so I don’t have any cool quotes from it handy, but there’s an interview with the author in a recent issue of U.S. News & World Report.

I found several things helpful in Bruegmann’s book. First of all, many authors, myself included, have assumed that suburban growth patterns are a largely North American phenomenon and that global cities have tended to be more compact and less sprawling. Bruegmann argues that suburban expansion is nothing new or particularly American, and that cities throughout history and around the world exhibit many of the same patterns. Suburban areas around Paris look just like those in the U.S. So suburban sprawl need not be seen as a 20^th-century American deviation, but rather as fairly consistent with historical and global norms.

Second, Bruegmann makes the case that suburban growth is not necessarily linked to white flight from urban racial diversity. The conventional wisdom in many circles has been that whites fled urban cores to the suburbs out of racism or fear of diversity, leading to disinvestments in the cities and urban decay, and that suburban growth came as a result of racial fear. Bruegmann points out that the biggest problem with this theory is that suburban growth patterns have been largely the same across the board, whether in cities with low minority populations, like Minneapolis, or those with high minority populations, like Chicago. In other words, suburbanization is a larger phenomenon than alleged white flight, or white flight is just one of many factors and by no means the most significant. Suburbanization takes place regardless of the racial and ethnic makeup of the cities and suburbs concerned.

Third, Bruegmann argues that the places most alleged to be sprawling suburban metropolises, like Tucson and Phoenix and other newer cities in the American south and west, actually have denser population and land-use patterns than many older cities. I suspect that economic forces are at work here; developers and city planners get more bang for the buck in new developments to have more property owners and tenants in their areas. Hence bigger houses on smaller plots of land and compact retail space that clusters more stores in smaller areas, rather than sprawling estates and wide-open suburban spaces. So “suburban sprawl” is not quite as distinct a phenomenon as previously assumed; many suburban areas are actually taking on the civic traits of denser urban communities. I think of this as the suburbanization of cities and the urbanization of suburbs—these are no longer neatly divided categories, but both are morphing as interdependent parts of a metropolitan whole.

I think Bruegmann may be a little too dismissive of the problems inherent to suburban environments, but his contribution is a helpful corrective to other literature that is more unilaterally dismissive of suburbs in general, as if nothing good can come of suburbia. Bruegmann’s take is more neutral than many. Suburbia is what it is, for good and for bad, and Bruegmann’s data will help us avoid making blanket generalizations about suburbia’s flaws.

I'm a suburban Christian. Are you?

I'm not an early adopter of new technology or gadgetry. My wife and I got a cell phone just a few years ago after we had our first son and thought we might need a phone in case of emergencies. Even so, we only have one cell phone between the two of us, and it's one of those prepaid pay-as-you-go kind, since we don't use it enough to warrant a monthly plan. Our PC is six years old and has a paltry (by today's standards) 4 gigs of memory, we still have dial-up internet service rather than broadband, and we've never subscribed to cable TV.

All this to say that I finally decided to join the blogosphere. It seems like everybody I know has a blog, and I began to wonder if I should have one too. One of the most interesting things to me about the blog world is browsing completely disconnected blogs and reading posts and seeing names of people I recognize from totally different circles. I'm an E on the Myers-Briggs, so I'm fascinated by the idea of connecting and networking with multiple people from various areas of life.

But what to blog on? What's my excuse for blogging? Well, this morning I realized, aha, I have a book being published this summer called The Suburban Christian, and I thought hey, that makes sense. I'll blog about suburban Christianity. That's general enough to work as an umbrella category. I'm a suburban Christian, so my posts will likely reflect the experience of suburban Christianity. Great.

So I click on Blogger's "Get Your Own Blog" link, work through the sign-up process and try "Suburban Christian" for the name of a blog. Sorry, that name is taken. I go to that blog just to see what it's about, and it looks like the blog was just started today. So someone else had the exact same idea as me. If I'd had the idea yesterday, I could have snagged suburbanchristian.blogspot.com, but I missed out and had to settle for thesuburbanchristian.blogspot.com. Oh, well. Such is life.

At any rate, I've lived in suburbia for most of my life, and I've spent the last couple of years researching the history and sociology of suburbia. I've come across some interesting stuff on how suburban land-use patterns, commuter culture and the like affect our daily lives, and I'll share some of that here in bits and pieces. I'm interested in how different Christians experience suburbia, and what churches can do to contextualize their ministries in a suburban context. So if you're interested in these same kinds of things, great! I'm glad to have companions on this suburban journey.