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1. Am I Too Cynical For This?: Evangelicalism

Two Options Arose:

1- Stop going to church. Read the books that suit me on faith. Talk with my friends about my faith and hobby of theology, but get away from the organized crap. This is the option that is statistically preferred.

2 - Find a church I could love, despite flaws, and work within the system while fighting my cynicism.

I chose option two. I committed to the church and Christ healed me. I didn’t know how, at the time, but I knew I was being healed. The sermons were good, but it wasn’t that. The Anglican liturgy was new to me and beautiful, and as a student of words this helped, but I think there was something more. The prayers were Trinitarian and theologically based: I could no longer handle all of the prayers that went like this “Lord you are just the best. We just delight in how you just love us.” Grammatical and syntactical problems aside, I did not want to be cynical of my upbringing, and I know that it wasn’t simply a different order of services that was healing me.

2. Frustrated Christianity

There are a lot of frustrated young Christians in America today. I’m one of them. I know more of them. If I try to boil the frustration down it points to a discontentment with how little our experience of Christianity resembles something in which God would need to be involved. As a frustrated Christian I don’t want people simply telling me that they have an answer for my frustration. The problem with an answer is that it is demeaning. I’m not stupid after all. I don’t have this concern for no reason. Encountering another platitude is not going to cure what ails me. The frustration is not an act of defiance. It is my true engagement with the faith. People who push against God are not trying to push Him away. We are trying to touch him. I get frustrated when in all my pushing I find that I’m not wrestling with God but just another construct, a mere idea, a personality, a false idol.

In Christianity we are supposed to spread the faith. Jesus asked his disciples to be "fishers of men". The typical "we need to evangelize" sermon you will hear at church goes something like this: God has given us a great gift in Jesus Christ. This gift is life changing and gets you into heaven. To generalize, if you believe X is either essential to living life or essential to avoiding harm why would you not share X with everyone? I can think of a couple of reasons.

4. How Should We Then Read? 

I recently purchased and read Alan Jacobs' book titled The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I was immediately rewarded when in the first section of the book Jacobs took canonical reading lists to task for turning reading into a task to be completed a certain way, with certain rules and certain materials. Read for whim, Jacobs advised. Jacobs does acknowledge a hierarchy in literature. He won't give you a reading list to work through. But he also doesn't like the idea that a reader might consign themselves to penny dreadfuls.

5.The Truth Will Set You Free But Not Until It is Finished With You

David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest (IJ) is a prolix investigation of the difficult but ultimately possible task of of maintaining a "long obedience in the same direction."  Among the host of characters in IJ, Don Gately, recovering Demerol addict and an employee of The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, (sic) is the exemplar of this ethic. Gately endures. He endures long hours with low pay at multiple jobs. He endures the stupid and frustrating antics of the tenants under his care at Ennet House. He endures the painfully obvious cliches of AA. Finally, when Gately is faced with his ultimate test (he is hospitalized for a gun shot wound and refuses medication for the pain because of his addiction) he endures by breaking time down into management chunks of one heartbeat at a time