I have a new essay up on Humane Pursuits today: "2 Reasons for Doing Manual Work This Summer."

In his book Engaging God's World, Cornelius Plantinga discusses the cultural implications of the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 1:26-28).

God's good creation includes not only earth and its creatures, but also an array of cultural gifts, such as marriage, family, art, language, commerce, and (even in an ideal world) government. The fall into sin has corrupted these gifts but hasn't unlicensed them. The same goes for the cultural initiatives we discover in Genesis 4, that is, urban development, tent-making, musicianship, and metal-working. All of these unfold the built-in potential of God's creation. All reflect the ingenuity of God's human creatures--itself a superb example of likeness to God. After the building trades had been corrupted for millennia (having been used to build Babel and Babylon, for example) Jesus adopted one of them as his own [as a carpenter]. Cities themselves are God's idea. Good urban landscape management is a godly occupation. After centuries of urban crime and decay, the destination of redeemed people is not a return ticket to the garden of Eden, but entry into "the holy city, the new Jerusalem." Because "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof," all the centuries of human obedience to the cultural mandate will have produced some treasure by the end--trash, too, but also treasure. If this is the "fullness" that belongs to God, then we may think of the holy city as the garden of Eden plus the fullness of the centuries.

To image God, then, human beings are charged not only with care for earth and animals ("subduing" what's already there) but also with developing certain cultural possibilities ("filling out" what is only potentially there). To unfold such possibilities--for example, to speak languages, build tools and dies, enter contracts, organize dance troupes--is to act in character for human beings designed by God. That is, to act in this way is to exhibit some of God's own creativity and dominion in a characteristically human way.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

We human beings have been created "in the image of God." This famous phrase appears first in the account of creation in Genesis 1, clearly at its climax. The account tells us of rhythmic busts of work in which God creates vegetation, birds, fish, and livestock "according to their kinds." Then, in describing the event of the sixth day, the account shifts into a majestic first-person plural, a cohortative. "Let us create," says God. The narrative signals us that something weighty is about to be created--something created not according to its kind, but almost according to God's kind. It's not as if God procreates as the birds and fish do. And yet at the end of the [creation] week God does create entities that are impressively like himself, a pair of persons who can live in society and who can use their gift to cause others to flourish.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion. . . . " So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; mail and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth."

This is the place in the story where activist Christians take a cue to go to work. There's so much to do in the world--so much caretaking and earthkeeping, so much filling and multiplying, so much culture to create. And . . . we'll have occasion to think of wonderful ways for human beings to fill the earth with the fruit of their creativity--wonderful ways to get busy.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Living and Learning

At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, defer to one another. Each person, so to speak, makes room for the other two. I know it sounds a little strange, but we might almost say that the persons within God show each other divine hospitality. After all, John's Gospel tells us that the Father is "in" the Son and that the Son is "in" the Father, and that each loves and glorifies the other. The fathers of the Greek church called this interchange the mystery of perichoresis and added in the Holy Spirit--the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. When early Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God, they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In a constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.

Supposing that hospitality means to make room for others and then to help them flourish in the room you have made, I think we could say that hospitality thrives within the triune life of God and then spreads wonderfully to the creatures of God. The one who spreads it is a mediator, a person who "works in the middle." We ordinarily think of Jesus Christ as the mediator of salvation, but I think we can see now that those mysterious places in the New Testament that speak of creation happening "through Christ" reveal that the agent of redemption is also the agent of creation. Christ is the person designated to work in the middle both times.

The Scriptures do not explain how Christ mediates at Creation, or exactly why, but they do give us hints. They say, for example, that Christ is not only the Son of God but also the "wisdom of God" and the "word of God." These metaphors suggest that the work of Jesus Christ represents the intelligence and expressiveness of the triune God. According to God's intelligence, the way to thrive is to help others to thrive; the way to flourish is to cause others to flourish; the way to fulfill yourself is to spend yourself. Jesus himself tried to get this lesson across to his disciples by washing their feet, hoping to ignite a little of the Trinitarian life in them. The idea is that if--in a band of disciples, in a family, in a college--people encourage each other, pour out interest and goodwill upon each other, favor each other with blessings customized to fit the other person's need, what transpires is a lovely burst of shalom.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning and Living

I can tell Wendell Berry is influencing my reading of Paradise Lost. As I read Book IX, I thought it was fascinating that on the day Eve succumbs to the Serpent's temptation, the reason Eve wants to be alone from Adam (and thus more susceptible to temptation) is her inordinate desire to do efficient work. When Adam and Eve get up that morning, Eve says to Adam,

     Let us divide our labours—thou where choice
     Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind
     The woodbine round this arbour, or direct
     The clasping ivy where to climb; while I
     In yonder spring of roses intermixed
     With myrtle find what to redress till noon.
     For, while so near each other thus all day
     Our task we choose, what wonder if so near
     Looks intervene and smiles, or objects new
     Casual discourse draw on, which intermits
     Our day’s work, brought to little, though begun
     Early, and the hour of supper comes unearned! (ll. 214-26)

Here, Eve thinks that because they are working together, they will get less done. In response, Adam reminds her that work is not an end in itself. God gave us work for our enjoyment, not for our misery. And when work is exalted to a place where it divides us from each other, there's a problem.

     ... Not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
     Labour as to debar us when we need
     Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
     Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
     Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow
     To brute denied, and are of love the food—
     Love, not the lowest end of human life.
     For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
     He made us, and delight to reason joined. (ll. 235-43)

I find that I am constantly confronted with suffering and chaos. It is ever present through social media, television, and the media-saturated world we live in. Sadness screams at us from every screen, casting a cloud of felt sickness and despair that we can’t seem to do anything about. I once heard one of my professors in Communications Studies call this “compassion fatigue.” We are bombarded by the voices of the news that make us feel helpless and guilty. Surely with a world such as this we should do something about it.

I believe seeing the world this way leads not to action, but to a kind of paralysis and dehumanization. We begin to see the world and its people as the dead, dying, and distressed, but we feel powerless to stop or change anything. In that focus on darkness, we forget what makes the atrocities of the world so awful to begin with: the destruction of beautiful, potato loving, culture building, jazz music playing human beings. Violence, illness, and war try with all their powers to deny, discolor, and dilute the true, vibrant, colorful nature of life. When our minds are filled with thoughts of “dying people” and “war,” we forget why it is that we fight against these things: because life, in all its pulsing, hobby filled, giggling reality is beautiful and to be preserved.

This does not mean that we forget the sad things that are happening in the world, or our fellow human beings suffering, or that we don’t fight for what is right and true. Rather, it means that we do not accept darkness as the ultimate reality. It means we dance in defiance, and we sing when the music stops. Only light can put out darkness. Only life can defeat death, and life is made up of a thousand things that never make the news.

Joy Clarkson, "The Importance of Playing the Saxophone"

What Soylent's proponents don't seem to understand is that food cannot be reduced to mere nutrition anymore than all of movement can be reduced to simple exercise, or sex and parenthood to mere reproduction (although in the latter case, the more strenuous socialists have tried!). Mealtime is a place of communion, conviviality, even sensuality. It is where we learn to be human.

Food production teaches us gratitude, because even with all the advances of chemistry and industrial agriculture, we did not invent photosynthesis, or the sun and the rain. We know, or ought to know, that living things were made to die for our sake. There is a satisfaction, difficult to articulate, in making one's own meal that cannot be found in the mere detritus of packaged meals. Yes, preparing food for others can be hard, annoying work. But as Gracy Olmstead points out in her fantastic defense of family mealtime, it is usually more than compensated in an enriched family life and affection. But in the autistic way that Marxists reduce so many human activities to the detested category of labor simpliciter, they also incinerate labors of love.

Michael Brendan Doughtery, "Soylent Food Is Here--And It Is Tyrannical"

"What are food and agricultural and culinary traditions for, anyway? You can't answer that question properly without first asking, what are people for? Answer that one, and the first question answers itself."

Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons