I started this essay project here a little under a year ago. On July 19, 2022, I published “The Politics of Charity”, and began that slow walk through the Stanley Hauerwas essay of the same name. In the year since, I published nine essays in the series, ending just last week with “Three questions for the church.”
I first conceived “The Politics of Charity” as a standalone series of essays, simply exploring a piece of writing that had had a profound impact on me when I first read it in the summer of 2020. But, sometime last year, as I worked my way through the writing, I began to feel the urge to expand the work I was doing, to do something more than I originally intended. Partly, this arose out of my thoughts on how to manage the presence I have online. I have a Wordpress blog; I have this newsletter; I have some limited social media. What should I be writing in each space? It can become very easy for this newsletter and my blog to become very similar, which they were for a while. It would also be a simple option to abandon one or the other, but I am reluctant to do that. But what would be the difference between the two, and what would justify putting time and energy into each?
I began to get some clarity on this as I started reading Paul Kingsnorth’s fantastic Abbey of Misrule newsletter. Kingsnorth’s newsletter operates as a long term project, with miniature series and headings, all aiming towards his overarching goal of explicating what he calls The Machine and how it shapes our lives. I began to fall in love with this format he is modeling: long essays, organized under a broad heading, divided up across time by smaller emphases and heading. “The Politics of Charity” started to make more sense in this light: as the first stab at a larger project.
That’s where I have come to, and why now that I have finished that series, you are seeing changes here. This newsletter is now formally shifting into what I have been visioning for several months now: an essay project titled The Radical Ordinary. Over the coming months (an intentionally indeterminate amount of time), I will be publishing a variety of series of essays, all under this one heading.
What is the project I am embarking on? I will cover that in more detail in the next essay, but in short, The Radical Ordinary is my small attempt to work out my own theology, to explore the ideas and voices and works that have shaped and influenced and inspired me, and to begin to achieve some coherence. Admittedly, this is largely a project of vanity in a sense, an exploration of my own interests and obsessions and the things I think are important and worthy of thinking about. But, as I write that, it occurs to me that all good writing in public is just that, and cannot ever really be truly disconnected from the author.
I draw the name The Radical Ordinary from the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a radical democrat and a Christian, by Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles. I first read this remarkable dialogue in book form in 2015, while at Phillips Theological Seminary. I haven’t been able to shake it ever since. It forced me down the political and intellectual road I’ve been on ever since. It forced me to reexamine my faith in traditional forms of political engagement, and my belief in the unproblematic engagement of the church with politics as the world does it, and to start asking hard questions that kept giving me uncomfortable answers. It shook me out of my unthinking political and theological assumptions and priors. It’s a book I return to often. The concept of the Radical Ordinary that Hauerwas and Coles is important to my thinking, and unlocks to many other currents that I ride; over the coming essays, we will explore more fully this book and this idea together, before moving outwards from that center point into other thinkers and works and ideas that, for me, arise naturally from the concept of what is means to live a Radical Ordinary life.
Back to the subject of this larger of project: in order to find the intellectual coherence I crave, I need an organizing principle. The Radical Ordinary provides that for me. I love this concept, the tension it creates, between the concept of something being both Radical - revolutionary, extremist, uncompromising - while also Ordinary - common, habitual, traditional.
Throughout this project, I will be exploring a variety of ideas and thinkers - John Howard Yoder, Jurgen Moltmann, post-liberalism, liberation theology, Oscar Romero, process theology, martyrdom, Stanley Hauerwas, the Book of Acts and the Epistles of Paul - all of these, and more. I invite you to join me, to read and think and respond and challenge and share. I’m not doing this to build a readership; I’m at a point in my intellectual development where a project like this is largely self-indulgent, driven by a desire to take stock and orient myself, and reflect on what has come before as I begin to move forward into new areas of life. And so while page views is not a goal here, I also want this to be something I do in public, because of the honesty and pushback it entails, in order to ensure I am not being too solipsistic or blinkered.
So, coming soon, we will explore just what I mean when I say “The Radical Ordinary”, by taking a brief look at the book. I am currently re-reading it in preparation for this work, but I hope to have a first essay out in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I may explore a return of Status Updates and maybe some conversation-centric posts as well. Whatever happens here, I’m glad you are here, and I look forward to walking this journey with you all.
Grace and peace,
Justin