James K.A. Smith
Social Media As Lessons In Writing
As it turns out, Twitter is pretty useful for academics. It's helpful a way of staying in touch with new things in my field. People use Twitter to share new discoveries and announcements about grants and conferences. By following others in my field and engaging them in conversation, I've made a few friends
But Twitter is also a good tool for learning to write. When I teach writing, I urge my students to use short words and short sentences. This seems to fly in the face of what they learn in high school, where they're taught to use ten-cent words when a one-cent word will do.
As odd as it may sound, I use Twitter and Facebook as a means of training myself to say things that matter to me in short form. James K.A. Smith says something similar in the sidebar to his Fors Clavigera blog; like me, he uses his blog to practice writing quickly and without much editing.
Twitter rewards brevity. If you can't say it quickly, you can't tweet it. And if you can't say it well, it will go unread. I can't say my tweets are great writing yet, but like any habit, the only way I can imagine changing my writing is by practice.
Theology and Theomythy
I was just reading Jamie Smith’s recent post on “Poetry and the End of Theology” over at his Fors Clavigera blog. His post reminded me of something I was thinking of several years ago when I was writing From Homer to Harry Potter.
Back in Homer’s time, the words λογος (logos) and μυθος (mythos) were near synonyms. Over time, they came to be distinguished from one another as meaning something like “an account in propositions” (logos) and “an account in stories” (mythos).
The word “logos” is one of the roots of our word “theology,” of course. Theology, then, means something like the attempt to discuss the divine in a logical and propositional manner. Which is all well and good, unless it begins to turn God into something we only analyze and never experience, about which we speak propositions but whose story never means much to us.
As a philosopher of religion, I think theology is important. The things we believe have consequences for us and for others. As one of my mentors, Ken Ketner, puts it, “Bad thinking kills people.” We know this from experience: people use theological ideas to justify all sorts of unethical behavior.
Nevertheless, theology is pretty dry stuff, and its very dryness has a genealogy and has consequences that we should be aware of. As Jamie puts it, some of the dryness of contemporary theology comes from a Cartesian anthropology that assumes that the most important part of us is that we are thinking things - things that care chiefly about propositions. If all we care about is getting our religion right, than this is the kind of theology we need, I suppose.
But is that what we are? Are we not also beings who live in the world, who live out stories, and who tell stories? Aren’t creativity and poetry and loveliness important to us as well? This got me thinking: maybe what we need is less theology and more theomythy. I’m not sure just what that would look like, but I think it might be worth a try. I’m interested in what you believe, sure. But I’m also interested in hearing your story.