Review of Moreton's "To Serve God & Wal-Mart"

I was first made aware of Bethany's work when I saw her being interviewed on Book TV. It was fascinating, seeing an east coast labor and gender historian talk about "my" world in ways that were nuanced, balanced, and insightful. I told her so, ordered her book, and then found out that she had interviewed and done some work with JBU's own Rick Ostrander and Joe Walenciak. Now it became clearer why Bethany did indeed understand our Wal-Mart and Ozark Christian College worlds at a fairly intimate level. She had spent some serious time getting to know us.

The book itself is not always up my alley. Bethany is still a gender and labor historian, and those are fields that don't thrill me very much. But in the second half of the book, Bethany offers some profound reflections that I haven't heard anyone else encapsulate quite so well.

1) The service industry in the south goes directly from farm service to retail service without ever really participating in the heirarchical industrial period where "service" is defined more as "servitude." That unique historical transition requires a completely different way of creating and harnessing service work.

2) Wal-Mart figures out how to do that work somewhat by accident as the employees of the eventual behemoth teach the leadership about what they need. Sam Walton and others are willing students, but they didn't really plan in advance how to "exploit" the abilities of their workforce. They just figured out how to get in front of the parade once it was already going.

3) That parade was driven by working mothers who wanted flexibility and respect in a community-friendly environment. Wal-Mart gave it to them, not the other way around. Exchanging labor for money in typical "industrial society" formats was much lower on the totem pole for all involved.

4) With "Service" largely unmoored from its industrial base, Christian interpretations of service became much more prominent with these working mothers being lauded and elevated as the pinnacle of what the company was about, even if they weren't being paid the most.

5) These Christian connections spiraled out to various organizations, such as SIFE, WISP, Christian colleges, various churches, etc. Wal-Mart was not a Christian company, but the "Wal-Mart Way" and Christian understandings of service and free enterprise dovetailed nicely to form a new service-oriented mentality.

6) This happy story has its usual embellishments and hypocracies involved (Sam didn't really start out poor, Wal-Mart got lots of money and support from the government, Christianity doesn't sit as easily with capitalism as these parties often seemed to indicate, etc.), but in general, the various players were sincere in their ideas and arguments, which is why this synergy has been so effective for so long.

At least that's my understanding of what Bethany had to say. We're looking at inviting her to JBU sometime this year, so perhaps I'll find out then whether my interpretations of her conclusions are on target.

Review of Smith's "Desiring the Kingdom"

I've looked through (read the intro and conclusion and skimmed the rest) Smith's new book, the first in his three volume "Cultural Liturgies" about spiritual formation. With that brief of a survey, I may not have understood the nuances of all of Smith's ideas, but my short response is that I didn't really like it. Maybe I'm just too wedded to the Calvin "world and life view" approach that he's rejecting (or at least the straw man version of that view that he's rejecting), but I much preferred Crouch's "Culture Making" approach to Smith's "spiritual formation ueber alles" argument. I can certainly understand, however, why a number of people at JBU might be more sympathetic than I am, at the very least for the support he would offer to the "spiritual formation" discussion and the challenges he would make to much of what we're currently doing.

Smith notes on page 219 (in footnote 6) that people have resisted some of his ideas (that the university is a subset of the church, that it should function more like a monastery, and that it should replace worldview language with spiritual formation language) for four reasons: it makes the university an extension of Sunday school, it violates "sphere sovereignty" separations, "spiritual formation" language is often considered too "fuzzy" and too dominated by SD folk, and, most importantly, we in contemporary culture are too wedded to modern (and almost "evil") notions of liberal autonomy when we should be returning instead to previous ancient and medieval understandings of human nature. I am guilty as charged, especially on that last one. I do not want some spiritual formation "philosopher kings" requiring me to participate in their specially designed set of discipline-focused small group activities, which is pretty much what Smith proposes in the last chapter as being the only "Christian" education worth its salt. Blech! I am actually joining a small group at church based on the work of James B. Smith (of Friends) that will emphasize spiritual disciplines, but hey, that's my choice, not something imposed on me by the spiritual formation cognoscenti.

In short, while I find Smith's arguments interesting and sometimes in keeping with my Episcopal inclinations, and while I can see how conversations with him might be valuable for a lot of people at JBU, I personally have very little desire to have his ideas become the centerpiece of a lot of our strategic planning work the way that Crouch's book so helpfully is becoming such a centerpiece. If we took Smith seriously, for example, we probably could not use the word "excellent" in our list of values, we would probably have to include words like "spiritual formation," "worship," or "liturgy" in our list of values, we'd probably have to shift from calling ourselves "interdenominational" to "nondenominational" (you have to be connected to some specific church in order to do Christian education, right?), and we'd have to up-end much of our Core Curriculum as well as our approach to integration of faith and learning. I would personally oppose all of those moves.

In short, it's not my cup of tea. Then again, neither was Wolterstorff, whose "Until Justice and Peace Embrace" ideas seem to undergird some of this work.

Review of "Why College Matters to God"

Finished up my former colleague Rick Ostrander's "Why College Matters to God." It's an updated and much refined version of a course pack he (and others) had put together for our Gateway to Christian Scholarship course. It's a really first-rate summation of the general thinking in Christian circles about why college matters and what students should be attempting to accomplish in their time in college. The real test for me is that I kept thinking throughout the book, "dang, why wasn't there something like this for me when I was student in college?" It's a great way to introduce students to the whole Christian college experience, and hopefully some of our parents and alums will read it as well?

More problems with USN&WR's "peer assessment" rankings

More concern about the "peer assessment" piece of USNWR, this time related to the grad side. To me, this has always been the least helpful part of the USN&WR reports, especially for smaller schools like ours. What's interesting is that even for the R1 schools, the evidence would seem to indicate that this part of the system is less than ideal.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/17/rankings

Concerns about the 3-year degree option

With all of the talk in favor of the 3-year degree option, this "con" article was helpful. The basic argument is that accelerated learning might work for adults (a point Dick is always making to me about why the Advance cutoff should stay at 23), but for 18-22 year olds, the "slow cooking" process of 4+ years is more appropriate.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/08/17/durden