Well, they didn’t say all of this, but I get the message. They want me to lighten up about texting. They want me to join the real world of new writing. And I am reluctant.

I might respond to my students that, sure, I get it, things are changing in the ways we connect, the ways we write. I get it. And I believe the phenomenon of language has always produced subcultures of usage and style and words. It is cool to use an esoteric language that most people don’t understand. Only your friends. Or only the younger generation, or those trying to be young. I affirm this fact of language development; I affirm all of this swirl of new communication, especially among the young these days. I want my students to teach me more.

But I still want to argue that good writing is essential, for the future work and success of our students, for the future of the world. We’ve got to continue to learn how to write well, to write good and correct sentences, to use strong and effective words, to marshal a good argument. And we’ve got to continue to learn how to read sophisticated text. The Constitution of the United States comes to mind. Since we have been talking about them lately, some of Abraham Lincoln’s great speeches come to mind. The Bible, of course, is in this category. Not the stuff of texting.

Someone told me at dinner the other night that Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter following is the largest in the world. I didn’t know that. 3,983,000 followers, at the moment. Some 10 or so times a day, he lets these followers know what’s on his mind, what he happens to be doing at the moment, things like, “the more FUN something is, the more people will participate”; or, “someone is publishing my tweets in German (in addition to Spanish and Japanese) — cool”; half an hour later he wants the world to know, “I guess we’re rolling in French too.” Stuff like that.

It’s all cool. I get it. It’s all so CURRENT. And all the followers feel so included, I guess, in the life of celebrity. It’s what’s happening. NOW. But it’s also inane! Do I really need to know this stuff? Do I really want to be a follower of Ashton Kutcher?

There is another side to this, though. All you have to do is dip into the Twitter feed of someone like Guy Kawasaki, or into his website called Alltop, to know that some people are using these tools for something with a great deal more substance. I am dazzled and slightly overwhelmed by what I see Guy talking about and the speed with which he talks and the huge crowd that is checking in. I’m impressed. It’s not my world, but it is certainly effective communication to huge numbers of people.

But even recognizing the power and effectiveness and currency of someone like Guy’s way, is it possible still to make the claim for writing that slows down? We will need it in the long run, won’t we? I am fully aware that writing that slows down too much will not find an audience, especially these days. But writing that slows down and writes in full and good sentences, with words chosen with care, with substance that is full of vitality, with content that ultimately or even occasionally brushes up against what is true and good and beautiful — we need this kind of writing too. Don’t we?

This is a huge change going on in our culture today. The implications are huge. We’ve got to understand these things. We don’t blow off these kinds of shifts in the language of culture. We owe it to our young people to understand what’s happening. We need to learn what is effective and important in all of this.

But we also owe it to our young people to teach them other, older, more lasting ways to communicate. And that will require learning to write and to read great writing, sophisticated text, deep and resonant and meaningful and beautiful language and thought.

I’m searching my way through all of this swirl. Help me out.

But from those markings it is also clear that I was thrilled to discover someone who might guide me on this journey of how to write. Here was someone not willing to leave it up to me to figure it out on my own. There are some rules. There are some standards. There are some things better than others. Here was an authority willing to tell it like it is. About writing well.

Here was someone eager to tell me that the active voice is better than a passive one: “I will always remember my first visit to Boston” is simply better than “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” One way of writing is more effective than the other.

Or here is another one: “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.” It is better to say “It rained yesterday, very hard, even fiercely,” rather than “A period of unfavorable weather set in over Seattle.” One is better writing than the other. Right?

Strunk and White remind us over and over that the great writers — those like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — use language and words that call up pictures. They remind us that “vigorous writing is concise,” a lesson I have always had to remind myself, especially in these days of hurry and scurry. Less is more: That’s a lesson we recently learned from Abraham Lincoln.

For years and years I used sentences with semicolons because Strunk and White told me these were good sentences. And by the way, a semicolon separates two independent clauses, a comma does not.

And while we are at it, if you write “red, white, and blue,” there is a comma before and. Our newspapers these days have forgotten this very good rule. But don’t forget it! The papers are wrong. Strunk and White said so, and that is good enough for me.

This year marks the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Elements Of Style. Millions of good writers over that time have read and studied and remembered the stern, yet witty common sense of good writing taught by Strunk and White. Last week in The Wall Street Journal, Mark Garvey asked what Strunk and White would likely make of our current “flurry of texting, tweeting, IMing, and Facebook chatting, much of it speed thumbed while steering with the forearms.” And he concludes that Strunk and White might actually celebrate: at least people continue to write when they want to communicate.

But make no mistake, there will be times, for our students, and for the important matters in our world, when good and careful writing is necessary. When that time comes, there remains no better guide than this little book called Elements Of Style. And when that times comes, when we must write well and correctly, we’d better be ready.

And so I say thank you for challenging me, for opening up my blind spots, for filling in the vacant spaces in the things I am trying to think through too. This conversation is helpful. It is encouraging and challenging.

Because of the comments over the weeks, I want to try to clarify some things. I wrote last week about my growing frustrations that the Christian voice is being marginalized more than ever in the secular culture in which we live. I tried to say that I believe there is serious danger ahead if we succeed in silencing the voice of people of faith in the public square. While I want to do so winsomely, effectively, and respectfully, I believe engaging the culture is necessary and right.

In his important work on the dramatic cultural shift from a “background” of belief to a “background” of choice about belief, the philosopher and historian Charles Taylor portrays this as nothing less than “a titanic change in our Western civilization.” The shift has been breathtaking. In his recent book A Secular Age, Taylor notes that we have moved “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” Such a culture is called a pluralist culture.

But “the presumption of unbelief” has “achieved hegemony,” says Taylor, in so many of the influential parts of our society: the university, the world of entertainment, the press, and so many parts of our government. When it comes to talking together about things that really matter, the presumption has grown that people of faith are really not up to the challenge. To make a claim on the truth somehow disqualifies you as an able and willing partner in discourse about the things that matter in the world.

A deeper problem occurs when we begin to regard positions of belief as “a sign of cognitive and moral infirmity,” to use the language of the inimitable intellectual Stanley Fish. And that has surely happened as well.

Is this a good thing? That’s the question I’m trying to ask.

I think it is critical to think through what it means to be a Christian in a genuinely pluralist culture. We live now with a presumption of pluralism. Pluralism assumes there are various points of view on what is true and good and beautiful, and we should all be at the table of discussion and deliberation. We should all be given the chance to aim our society in directions that are good.

For me this is where the Christian perspective has so much to offer. Our faith proposes from the beginning a vision for human flourishing. Our vision for human flourishing is about building new lives and new communities out of broken ones. It is about entering the picture when people are not flourishing. It is about bringing help and hope into the world. Surely the Christian voice should not be silenced and marginalized when the stakes are so high for our world.

The scary question is what our world will be like if we no longer have the voice of people of faith at the table, in the mix. That’s the issue I am trying to get at. That’s what I find myself worrying about. That’s why I think engaging the culture is so important. Well, let’s think this through carefully, because it does matter. Thank you for caring with me and sharing your thoughts.

Judge Roberts and his wife, both of them apparently sincere Christians, were constantly in the spotlight through this nomination process — precisely because they were Christians. Judge Roberts was asked, quite bluntly at times, if religion would get in the way of performing his duties faithfully on the Supreme Court. Would he be willing and able to keep his faith, as Peter Steinfels of The New York Times said at the time, “separate from his legal judgments”? One priest, who knew the couple well, even suggested that their faith “would affect their personal lives, but they are very professional in their work.”

I take it this means that faith, if it were allowed to seep into public responsibilities, might cloud clear thinking or muddy the waters of the wise discernment required of a Supreme Court justice or any professional in any area.

Steinfels suggests that what we are talking about these days is “a warm but conventionally contained religious faith,” a faith that must stay tightly restricted to the private sphere and must be fiercely guarded on all fronts from contaminating one’s pure, professional performance. “This dichotomy,” says Steinfels, “between the personal and the public comes naturally to a Western culture that for half a millennium has been gradually freeing areas like law, science, medicine, politics, and economics from direct oversight by religion.”

This is true, of course — but it is worth asking if law, science, medicine, politics, and economics have been better off freed from any influence of religion or people of faith? And further, are we really fretting here about “direct oversight” of religion? What in the world could that mean in our day and age? Never in American history have we had anything close to “direct oversight by religion” in any matter of public arrangement.

No, what we are really fretting about, persistently and constantly as a society in our day, is the fear that religion might have any influence at all in the things that really matter in our society. We seem gripped by fear, mortified in fact, that someone’s faith might somehow come out into the open and actually make a difference in the way one performs his or her public duty or professional performance.

How have we come to this? We are close here to living in a culture that is hell-bent on airbrushing the influence of Christian faith and conviction out of the public arena, even out of our history. What nonsense that a Christian could or should eliminate one’s deepest personal convictions from informing judgment or performance, and yet that is precisely what is suggested in these public debates.

On the very positive side of all of this, it is my deepest of convictions that Christians have a great deal to offer that is of immense value to all areas of culture and society. We actually should be turning to people of faith for answers, for insight, and wisdom. Rather we seem to be saying that people of faith should have no voice. And that’s ridiculous and damaging in the long run for our society.

We must certainly affirm the separation of church and state. That is the law of the land, and it is a very healthy principle on both sides of the equation. But when it comes to these concerns about Chief Justice Roberts, or you or me, speaking as Christians into the great issues of our day — this is not at all what was intended by the separation of church and state by our American founders. The fierce battle to completely secularize our culture is not the same thing as the protection of both church and state in the intended separation.

We can do better than this, can’t we?

Found at Starbucks: A Latte and a Big Idea

I will be talking about Lincoln in a later post or two, but today I want to say something about good language, good writing, and why it matters. Sometimes we are told that text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook have taken over the world. There was a Wall Street Journal article to that effect just this past week. Email is passé, the article said, because it requires of us too much language. The world is moving fast and so is texting: It is short, succinct, to the point, direct in its connections, and so on.

Don’t believe it for a moment. As we looked at Lincoln this last week through the eyes of our scholar Ron White, we were reminded that Lincoln was a writer. He was careful with language. He was nuanced, subtle, clear. He was a leader through his writing and speaking. He wrote speeches and letters and op-eds and even notes that he stuck in the top of his stovepipe hat. He was writing all of the time. I like that.

He was a great listener, too, and a careful and voracious reader. He was reflective, sometimes brooding and melancholy. But out of all of this he was a writer, and out of his writing, he figured out what he thought and how he should lead. And when the chips were down he would turn to the great writing of the ages — to the Bible, to Shakespeare, to the Constitution, to the Declaration of Independence.

He believed that good language could not only capture ideas, but good language could communicate, motivate, clarify, encourage. Good language could stir people to action. Good language could move people in the right direction. Good language could heal the wounds of a nation. Good language could move the nation toward understanding its own identity. This is what Lincoln did through his writing.

Some of his speeches — in particular the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address — are some of the most important writing in American history and literature. They are quite simply magnificent. Ron White calls the Second Inaugural one of the “sacred texts” of American history.

Lincoln’s speeches were short. Perhaps that’s a lesson we need to learn from Lincoln. He was not texting-short or Twitter-short, but when the great orator of the day, Edward Everett, gave the keynote address at Gettysburg for the dedication of the memorial site for 50,000 soldiers who died there, he spoke for over two hours. Lincoln spoke for two minutes. Does anyone remember what Everett said? Less is more, Ron White advised us this last week. Lincoln is our model.

We must be careful that we do not lose the ability to write and to speak with care and attention to good language. Leaders must take great care to lead with good ideas and with good language. Lincoln spoke for two minutes and changed the world. We’ve got much to learn from that.

But let’s think about what’s going on, perhaps beneath the partisan debate. I’m not sure I even understand all of the issues of the public policy being proposed. I’m not sure anyone does. I think I would first call on our leaders to lead with a simplicity on the other side of complexity. That’s what we need at the moment. What are the simple, compelling issues at stake? People need to understand those in order to buy in.

I happened to be reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America the other night. This towering study is regarded often, as its most recent editors proclaim, “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”

Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who travelled across the country in 1830 for nine months — trying to decide for himself what this phenomenon called democracy was all about. To the dismay of some of his fellow aristocrats in France, as the editors say, Tocqueville reported back that “democracy was irreversible as well as irresistible.”

What are these Americans like? From the beginning, says Tocqueville, Americans have sought in every way to “decentralize” authority. This is one of our deep themes.

“A central power, however enlightened, however learned one imagines it, cannot gather to itself alone all the details of the life of a great people. It cannot do it because such a work exceeds human strength. When it wants by its care alone to create so many diverse springs and make them function, it contents itself with a very incomplete result or exhausts itself in useless efforts.”

If Tocqueville is right, when we tilt too much in the direction of too much “central power,” an American public will respond with questions about whether it can work. This is so, Tocqueville would argue, at a level deeper than the partisan divide between Right and Left.

And further:

“Then sometimes it happens that centralization tries, in desperation, to call citizens to its aid; but it says to them: ‘You shall act as I wish, as long as I wish, and precisely in the direction that I wish. You shall take charge of these details without aspiring to direct the sum; you shall work in the darkness, and later you shall judge my work by its results.’ It is not under such conditions that one obtains the concurrence of the human will. . . . Man is so made that he prefers standing still to marching without independence toward a goal of which he is ignorant.”

So here is another deep cultural theme that should concern us in this current debate. People need to understand before they will follow. They need ownership of some sort for the great moves that will impact their lives. They don’t like having to “work in the darkness” or march toward a goal they don’t get. And if leaders show any sign of arrogant (aristocratic) superiority, the public will balk. This is true for the nation as well as our companies and organizations. People will prefer “standing still to marching” forward toward a goal they are supposed to accept on trust.

Well, this according to Tocqueville. But could these core themes for American democracy help explain at least some of what is going on in this current debate and why the debate is so heated? While it still remains unclear to me, I trust that we, as a nation, can come together beyond politics to adopt a plan for health care that will make our world a better place for all of God’s children.

For those of you who know what this opening time on the university campus is like, you know it is huge and wild and wonderful. If you are in my business and don’t appreciate the excitement of these openings, you need to find another line of work. The air is expectant, full of new energy. This is a season of anticipation, a season of new beginnings. Wipe the slate clear and begin again — that’s part of the feeling, part of the joy of academic seasons.

But it is also the excitement, the anxiety, even the fear of new students entering our community for the first time. You can see it in the eyes. They try to be cool and hip, but mostly they are nervous. I heard a sophomore, so wise and experienced, giving advice to a new freshman: “Oh, man, it will be awkward. Once you’ve asked where the other person is coming from and what residence hall he or she is living in, everyone goes awkwardly silent. There isn’t anything more to say. . . . But you’ll get through it.”

But of course I am always so deeply impressed with the opportunity and the responsibility we have to help shape these lives. It’s scary. It’s huge. I truly believe they come asking for bread, and we must constantly make sure we are not handing them a stone. We’ve got to get this right. As you look into those eyes, and into the eyes of their parents, you realize the stakes are very high. We’ve got to share with them a story of what is true and good and beautiful so that they can imagine for themselves that they can change the world. That’s got to be our focus. That’s a big deal, isn’t it?

Well, you will be seeing a number of new posts on the blog very soon. I’ll be back to it immediately. I am eager to share some new thoughts I have. I’m eager to get your thoughts as well.

Found at Starbucks: A Latte and a Big Idea

Think about the stories of these lives. Are there some threads of meaning that might be helpful as we lead our own lives? If we can step aside from the politics of it all, I think about leading lives of deep convictions. I think about persistence and hard work and discipline. I think about sharp differences that always arise among people of conviction, but I think about the need for civility even in disagreement. I think about lives of thoughtfulness and curiosity. I think about showing love and concern for others, perhaps this most of all. I think about embracing a story of what is true and good and beautiful.

There were lots of wonderful things said about the long and distinguished public career of Senator Kennedy today. I know there were deep failures in his life, and I disagreed with Ted Kennedy often. Not one of the speakers at the funeral, from the Senator’s sons to the president of the United States, failed to note that Ted Kennedy’s life was complex and controversial, troubled and turbulent, full of unspeakable tragedy, sometimes sadly wrong. Even so, we were told, he lived his life with vigor and joy. He stayed the course with his liberal convictions to the end. He sometimes mercilessly attacked people with whom he disagreed, but he was also devoted to his family and to the people who worked for him.

What a complex story. And I find myself thinking, all of our stories are complex, aren’t they? We do some good things. We stand passionately for convictions. But we make mistakes. Our lives are full of failure and sadness too. And how does it all add up?

In surely one of the darkest passages from Shakespeare, Macbeth ponders just these things:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Oh, my, is this all there is? Or are there some meaningful threads and themes that begin to weave their way into our lives? Fate and circumstance determine a great deal about our stories. But is that it? Isn’t it possible to make some serious choices along the way and craft then a narrative for our lives that has meaning?

And here’s the really big question for me: Isn’t it possible to align the little stories of our lives with God’s huge narrative of love and joy and reconciliation?

I believe we can. And that can make all the difference.