Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before hitting the paywall. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
Today marks another trip around the Sun for me. I am very grateful to have made it! I will be spending the bulk of the day in the recording studio with my girls attempting to knock out the last three “scratch tracks” that will form the foundation of our upcoming album. We saved the most musically challenging ones for last, so it should be fun. And I think I am going to attempt, for the very first time in my life, to properly cook a rack of ribs—that is, very slowly on my RecTeq RT-700, the mother of all pellet grills. The beauty of the RecTeq is that I don’t have to be at home monitoring anything. I can keep an eye on the grill and control it right there from the studio by way of my phone.
Oh, and it is also Cornelius Van Til’s birthday, if you celebrate.
And tonight I’ll be watching my Twins go for their eleventh straight!
This week I was putting the finishing touches on the publication version of the paper I wrote for the RTS Faith & Work Symposium, and it reminded me of something I’d sort of forgotten, having been out of the academic world for some time. It has long been customary in academic writing that authors should avoid using the first person. That’s why the articles are filled with things like, “one might suggest” (instead of “I suggest”), “one questions if,” (instead of, “I question”), “the present author would have thought” (instead of “I thought”), and so on. It’s like the author is trying to pretend that he or she isn’t authoring anything, or to somehow keep it a secret from the reader that he or she is writing, as if some person other than the one named at the top of the article is writing.
One may perhaps think it a mystery who came up with this rule and when, but it seems to the present author something rather silly and results in some fairly clunky prose; one might think to oneself, as does the present author, that academic essays may well benefit from the inclusion of some actual human personality.
See what I mean? Enough of that, already. I toyed for about a minute or two about whether I should conform to this pageantry before realizing that this present author is quite unable to do so even if he were to try. Alas, I am simply out of practice and I have to write in my own voice, which is anything but passive.
Let me show you what I mean. The essay, which is slated to appear in a forthcoming edition of RTS’s online journal, is entitled Paradisial Gin & Tonics: On The Redemption of the Artifacts of Human Cultivation. I would have no earthly idea how to write the opening two paragraphs in standard “Academese.” In fact, I don’t think it can be done:
‘Dad, will we have Chinese food in heaven?’ That was the earnest and innocent question I received from my nine-year-old daughter as we were enjoying a culinary delight from the Far East. I quickly replied ‘Yes.’ Why would a father go out on a tenuous limb and disappoint a child? But I knew she was not asking an easy question. She had asked a deeply profound and wide-ranging question involving nearly every loci of systematic theology. This can be illustrated by rephrasing it: ‘Dad, is this human cultural artifact known as “Chinese” food, crafted with human ingenuity from the raw materials of God’s original creation, going to survive the eschatological cataclysm of the Last Day and exist and be enjoyed in the New Heavens and the New Earth?’ That way of putting it, as it happens, is far more controversial.
Further considering the question, I recalled a vested interest of my own: a letter in my email inbox from the late Professor John Webster, regarding a conversation we had had about another scholar. He poignantly signed off with this promissory note: “The celestial Bavinck club will include us all, I trust, with me in charge of paradisial gin and tonics (always that first sip, never a hangover).” I confess wishing to share his trust that paradisial gin and tonics are real, and that in eternity none other than John Webster will tend the bar for the Bavinck club.
I suppose one could introduce the theological question of whether the artifacts of human civilization in this age (from food to cocktails to symphonies to sculptures and everything in between) will survive into the age to come in standard academic prose, but I hope you’ll agree with me that it isn’t nearly as engaging and fun. We need to make academic theology fun again, and one way to help is to have authors use their own voices.
Anyway, I do attempt to provide an answer to that thorny theological question over the six thousand or so words that follow that introduction, and I look forward to sharing it with you when it is finally published.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Square Inch to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.