My introduction to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), came by way of YouTube a couple of years ago when I watched the rousing six-minute speech he gave at Ebenezer Baptist Church on MLK Day in 2011 (earlier this year, he became the first Latino speaker to deliver the keynote address for that same event).

In that 2011 speech – which I’ve embedded at the end of this post – Rodriguez sought to reassure his audience, saying with a tinge of humor, “We are not here to teach America the macarena. We are not here to increase the dividend portfolios of those that have invested in Taco Bell. We are not here to make you press one for English and two for Spanish.”

Invoking Dr. King as an inspiration, the fiery Pentecostal preacher went on to say:

I believe that we stand at the precipice of a new civil rights movement in America – a movement committed to righteousness and justice, one where our communities come together like Joshua and Caleb, and with faith in God we will declare the words, “As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord.” So let us be strong and brave as we carry Dr. King’s dream into the barrios and Beverly Hills, from New York to L.A., from Atlanta to Phoenix, let us remind America that the kingdom of God is not red state or blue state, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, immigrant or native, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost!

Needless to say, Rodriguez is an evangelical leader worth paying attention to, and now that’s written The Lamb’s Agenda: Why Jesus Is Calling You to a Life of Righteousness and Justice (Thomas Nelson), more of us are getting the chance to hear what he has to say. I’ll admit from the outset that while I have a great deal of respect for Rodriguez as a Christian leader, and while I’d encourage everyone to give him an attentive hearing, I didn’t love this book, though I really wanted to.

Ever since the age of 14, Rodriguez has considered it a personal calling to reconcile the messages of Martin Luther King and Billy Graham – to help Christians establish “the crucial connection between biblical social justice and spiritual righteousness.” He points to the nexus of the cross of Christ as a model for our lives. Christians are living fully, he argues, when their lives align vertically with God and horizontally with their neighbors. Much of this book is about explaining and reinforcing those essential connections. While the concepts are simple, and may strike some of us as Christian clichés, I’m not convinced the majority of us have fully internalized them yet, so I’m grateful for his impassioned pleas.

Politics is a central theme in the book, and from the start Rodriguez appears to take a refreshingly nonpartisan approach. At a time when Latinos are seen as a demographic up for grabs, and when there finally appears to be traction for bipartisan immigration reform, it’s obviously a timely moment for a book by a politically-minded Latino evangelical leader to be published – a book showing Latinos aren’t a monolithic voting bloc, say, who aren’t going to have their votes coopted. But ultimately I found Rodriguez’s political comments a bit confusing.

As Rodriguez puts it, the Lamb’s Agenda is distinct from the competing and pervasive political agendas of our day, whether of the donkey or the elephant. I agree. Yet Rodriguez’s own agenda – and, in turn, his explanation of what he considers the agenda of the Lamb – is far less distinct. While he’d possibly part ways with some Republicans in his support for immigration reform (recent GOP support for reform notwithstanding), the rest of his political platform is strikingly consistent along party lines – he’s a fervent defender of the unborn, supports traditional marriage, and is deeply concerned about violations of religious freedom, citing the deeply troubling HHS contraceptive mandate (David Neff’s review of the book in Christianity Today has more to say about this). Rodriguez is also a vocal supporter of the Manhattan Declaration.

I respect all of that, even if I’d nuance things differently in some cases. It’s perfectly fine he’s a conservative Republican, writing a book as a Latino leader in support of conservative Republican values. I just wish he’d say so. That would, after all, make for an interesting, important book. But it’s not how this one is presented. (And to be clear, I’d be equally critical if his articulation of the “Lamb’s Agenda” amounted to nothing more than boilerplate for a group on the other side of the aisle.)

Further, when he plays into simplistic, sensationalized ideas about a monolithic entity called “the media” being a sinister enemy, and when he talks approvingly of “manifest destiny” and “American exceptionalism,” he sounds like he’s memorized a set of predictable talking points, rather than truly articulating heartfelt convictions – which is precisely what he does so well in that MLK Day speech, and why I was so eager to learn from him in the first place.

At the end of the day, maybe my beef has more to do with the medium than with anything else. Maybe Samuel Rodriguez communicates best in the pulpit or on the street corner, speaking his mind with passion, not confined to the printed page. After all, a book about the importance of both spiritual vitality and social engagement is generally the kind of thing that tends to be right up my alley.

Rodriguez does well when he reminds us that every man and woman – including those with whom we most disagree – is made in the image of God. I’m just disappointed he risks undoing all that by playing into an us-versus-them culture war mentality that pits Christians against the attacks of government, schools, the media, insert-various-other-sinister-institutions-here. He would have done better, in my view, to skip those tired polemics and instead expand on the ideas, for instance, behind this wonderfully evocative paragraph:

The day of angry evangelicalism is officially over. The day of a loving, Bible-believing community espousing truth with love officially commences right now. For if we truly understand that every human being is made in God’s image, then we can proceed to advance the Lamb’s Agenda.

To that, without hesitation, I say a hearty amen.

Over on my Reading page, I have lists of the books I’ve read every year since 2003. In the course of a decade, the tally is somewhere around 800, I think, which, when I stop to think about it, is a pretty big number.

Reading isn’t all I do, of course. During the past decade I finished college, worked several jobs, traveled the world, participated in the life of a local church wherever I found myself, went to grad school, served on two nonprofit boards, spent quality time with friends, moved across the country, joined a softball league, and most monumental of all, got married. Oh, and yesterday we got the keys to our first home! Reading is what I’ve done when I haven’t been doing those other things.

Living in a wealthy, highly-literate country like the United States, you’d think everybody would read books. And, in fact, most do… though most do so only very occasionally. In 2012, 75% of Americans ages 16 and over read at least one book. Of those who have read at all over the past year, however, the median number of books read was six. That’s an average of one book every two months. And studies are clear that these reading habits are on the decline.

Now, I certainly wouldn’t argue that the length of a person’s book list is the measure of a life well-lived. A larger number of books is not automatically better. As John Wesley put it, “Beware you be not swallowed up in books: an ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”

As a reminder to myself – and, by extension, to anyone who stumbles upon my online reading list – I have that Wesley quote emblazoned at the top of my aforementioned Reading page, along with this statement of personal belief:

If we had to choose between loving and reading, we’d certainly do well to choose the former. My hunch, though, is that the discipline of reading widely and well is a crucial part of loving God with our minds and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Nonetheless, it’s still certainly possible to read irresponsibly – to use reading as a substitute for loving our neighbors, cultivating a craft, being a good citizen, or enjoying God’s good creation. Those of us who read a lot need to guard against this.

But I loved what Enuma Okoro (@TweetEnuma) recently had to say on the Her.meneutics blog about the importance of reading for leading holy, engaged lives:

Reading and writing as a way of engaging the holy is not a new idea, and yet, we don’t consider it enough anymore as a viable way to make small pockets of sanity and sense within the various wards of our crazy human existence. Perhaps this is in part due to the growing and saddening decline of reading in general. In a 2007 report, the National Endowment for the Arts shared some frightening figures in the decline of reading among Americans over the years, starting with teens and extending through adulthood. Almost half of American young adults between 18 and 24 never read for pleasure. And reading, according to the report, correlates with social and civic engagement. The more we read the more involved we tend to be in our communities. Bookworms do actually inch their way outside and into the world, more so than non-readers it seems.

For those who aren’t inclined to read books as a consistent discipline, maybe this will prompt you to give it a try. And for those of us whose book-reading has begun to devolve into a selfish form of escapism, I hope we’ll see anew that our reading should not – indeed, must not – end with us.

[Photo: Stanley & Livingstone, a bookstore in The Hague, The Netherlands via bookstoreguide.org]

1. Learning about our faith from atheists
Larry Alex Taunton writes for The Atlantic about the reasons college students walk away from religion. As he talked with members of campus atheistic groups about their journeys away from faith, he got some surprises responses about what pushed them away (and what didn’t). Interestingly, he found that these young atheists had a tremendous amount of respect for those who, in their estimation, actually believed what they claimed to believe and who stood by their convictions.

2. The future of poverty reduction
The Economist weighs in on emerging post-MDG plans to continue reducing extreme poverty:

So how realistic is it to think the world can end extreme poverty in a generation? To meet its target would mean maintaining the annual one-percentage-point cut in the poverty rate achieved in 1990-2010 for another 20 years. That would be hard. It will be more difficult to rescue the second billion from poverty than it was the first. Yet it can be done. The world has not only cut poverty a lot but also learned much about how to do it. Poverty can be reduced, albeit not to zero. But a lot will have to go right if that is to happen.

3. Christianity in its Global Context
While it may not make for particularly riveting reading cover-to-cover, there’s a lot of helpful and interesting stuff in this new report from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.

4. Common Good Edinburgh
I had a great Skype conversation yesterday with Duncan McFadzean (@DuncanMcFadzean), comparing notes about what we’re trying to do with Common Good PHX and Common Good Edinburgh, respectively. Here’s a bit about what’s happening in Scotland:

We are a group of people who care about Edinburgh. We believe that our city has very great potential for good, both as a place to live together, and in its wider effects on the world. We appreciate that lots of people are working hard to keep the city running, to solve its problems, to try to ensure everyone is cared for, and to develop new ventures. And we recognise that it is often these people, all across our communities, who are best placed to imagine and see this potential and to increasingly see it realised. We want to encourage, provoke and facilitate conversations around the ‘common good’ of the city. What would the city look like if it fulfilled its potential for good?

5. Syncopated

[Photo: Edinburgh, Scotland via gdefon.com]

– David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

1. The geography of Bob Dylan
Slate put together a great map representing all the actual places that have made their way into Dylan’s songs:

Bob Dylan’s music, it’s often said, happens in a world of its own—where the highway is for gamblers and you’re always 1,000 miles from home. It’s a surreal, ethereal realm, lawless but for chance, allusion, and rhyme. And yet it is our world, because there’s another, parallel tendency in Dylan’s songs: the direct place-name reference. Once the amateur Dylanologist tries to think of some, they flood the brain… And so, to mark Dylan’s 72nd birthday and the 50th anniversary of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his breakthrough album, we present Bob Dylan’s World, an interactive map with entries for every place-name in a song written by Dylan and released on some kind of album.

2. Vocation and (com)passion
David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) on the dangers of utilitarian vocations that paradoxically serve to keep passions at a safe distance:

If you choose a profession that doesn’t arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around. You might end up enlarging the faculties we use to perceive the far — rationality — and eclipsing the faculties we use to interact with those closest around — affection, the capacity for vulnerability and dependence. Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god.

3. Socio-economic reconciliation
The good folks at the Chalmers Center (@chalmerscenter) urge us to consider “the great divide” and where we fit in:

Take a moment to explore your city. What is the average income for your neighborhood compared to the rest of the state? Does the socio-economic makeup of your church reflect that of the community around it? If your church is in a wealthy community, are there strategically placed, effective ministries in low-income areas with which you might partner? If you want to go even deeper, examine rental expenses and income levels throughout your city. Does the relationship between rental prices and income remain roughly consistent between neighborhoods? Or do residents in particular low-income neighborhoods face equal or higher housing costs compared to residents in higher-income areas?

4. Why Kuyper matters
There has been a spate of new books published about Abraham Kuyper lately, and the American religious historian Mark Noll wrote the forward to one of the massive ones. Eerdmans published the forward on its blog, and here’s an excerpt:

The vigor of Kuyper’s convictions, along with his strenuous efforts at putting them into practice for religious, educational, and political purposes in the Netherlands — and with the significant numbers around the world who have found his ideas inspiring — makes him a figure of world historical significance. It also means that a biography like this one must be done with care, so that readers come to understand Kuyper in his own life context as well as the influence his ideas have had.

5. Churches and cities as partners
Here’s an interview with Kevin Palau (@kevinpalau), an evangelist, and Sam Adams (@PDXSamAdams), the former mayor of Portland (a city not necessarily known for its Christians) on what it looks like for churches and cities to act as partners for the common good.

[Image: readreidread.wordpress.com]