PERFORMING A CHRISTIAN LIFE
QUESTION & ANSWER
1. Why did you write this book?
Originally, I was working on a book on moral knowledge, on how Christians, in particular, gain information and insight about how to live well and what makes for living a good life, on the inputs for our moral imaginations. Gradually, I became convinced that I needed to do some more foundational work before I could explain very well how Christians should think about the sources of moral knowledge. A second concern, and a concern that lies behind this book and the one that will follow it, is how hard it is to know who one really is and to remember who one is in our everyday lives. Daily we are barraged with information and media that not only distract us from the things that matter but also tear us away from our deepest identities. We are living in a time in which it is hard to understand and remember who we really are and to live as much more than mere consumers looking for our next purchase.
2. Why the title, Performing a Christian Life?
First, too many of us too much of the time just let life happen to us. We respond and react to external events, rather than actively living in light of who we are and who we desire to become. I hope the title serves to encourage us to live more mindfully and to live as the creatures God has created us to be, to perform our lives as the people we really are. Secondly, I think the metaphor of a musical performance of, say, a jazz trio or quartet, is wonderfully illuminating for understanding many facets of living well. For example, as we pursue the good and try to live good lives, although we may occasionally perform solos, those solos are always a part of a piece we are playing with others. We are always performing even our solos as part of some combo or ensemble. To live a good life is to live one’s life as a performance with others who are also performing their lives. Living a good life is not simply doing some things and avoiding doing others, as important as that can be. It is also about performing one’s life as the person God calls us to be.
3. Who is your intended audience?
I try to write as a Christian thinker and here I aim primarily to help Christians to better think about and understand living a good life in light of who they are, in light of their Christian identities. Of course, all thoughtful and reflective people, Christian or not, wonder about how their lives are going and whether they are living well. I hope these others who may be interested in better thinking about the good life or in learning more about how Christians think about living a good life will be in the audience. I write as one familiar with the important conversations about living well in the western philosophical and theological traditions and I recognize and want to share with others the value and worth of the reflections of those traditions for today. This is a book aimed at general readers, including students, at people who care about important things, not experts, though I hope experts also will find value in the book.
4. Are there things that, in retrospect, you worry you may have left out of the book that should have been included?
Yes, perhaps more explicit attention to hope. We live in especially troubled and troubling times. Our leaders seem unable and unwilling to cooperate in order to achieve worthy ends. Bickering with one another and circling the wagons to protect what we believe to be our own private interests rather than caring for common goods is a strategy of distraction and despair. This is no way to deal with the global climate change that most threatens--and first threatens--the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Our refusal to address global climate change might all by itself lead us to despair, but couple that failure with the continuous distractions and encouragements of consuming more and more stuff and also attempting to destroy those with whom we disagree, and it is hard not to give up on a good life, on living well. Nevertheless, Christians are people of hope, and that hope is a gift we can bring to those around us. The world needs us to be hopeful. We can live good lives, even in very hard times. We see that in the lives of hope-filled Christians who have weathered storms before us. We see that in the lives of our living brothers and sisters who are for God and for the good despite the difficulties they daily face. The world needs us to perform our lives, to perform God’s music of peace and justice, and to perform our lives hopefully.
5. The stories of the lives of Christians are important for you and for Performing a Christian Life, aren’t they?
Indeed! In every chapter I try to tell the story of a person whose life or whose thought—and, in the case of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose life and thought—can help us better understand and live a good life. You and I perform our lives not just with Christians who are alive today; we perform the music of our hope-filled lives with the clouds of witnesses who have come before us. How can I know how to perform my life if I am not listening to the music performed by Christians in Nanjing and Nairobi as well as in Chicago and in Mount Berry, GA? How can we know how to perform our lives if we aren’t listening for what saints, virtuosos, like Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Dolly Cameron, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Esther John are playing?
6. What is the music they are playing?
Well, the great theologian Karl Barth thought it would be Mozart. I’m pretty sure it’s jazz, too. Maybe “A Love Supreme.” Probably Terence Blanchard’s “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina).” Sometimes probably the Miles Davis Quintet’s arrangement of “Surrey with a Fringe on Top.” And Bill Evans, no doubt, a lot of Bill Evans. And Van Morrison. And music from the English choral tradition.
7. You include at the end of each chapter a set of questions.
Right. I hope those questions will encourage readers to slow down, think more deeply, and connect the material they have read with other puzzles and problems and things worth thinking about. And, I think those are good questions for conversations with others as well. They are meant not only to be intellectually stimulating but also to be community building and to build community we have to put down our phones and talk with one another about things that matter, though not only the things that matter greatly.
8. Any final words about the book?
I hope readers will find in Performing a Christian Life an invitation, an invitation to identify God’s project in our world and to ground our own projects in God’s project. Our lives are gifts, trusts from God, to sing God’s song for the creation God loves and will not abandon. What greater call, what better life, could there be than this? How can we keep from singing?