new data
Final post I’m moving over from previous projects. What I’m naming here could easily be the exact way you might feel about my project.
Several years ago, I remember seeing Rob Bell speak about his newest book and him telling a story about the content. He was sitting with a friend who was a data engineer of some sort and Bell said he was not sure he should publish the book because “there wasn’t anything new in it.” His data engineer friend tells that in his field that if you have found a new way to order in present the data/information at the end you have created new data/information. “These things might have already been in the world, but they have been presented through you yet.”
When I finished reading Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer, I came away thinking the same. John Mark has taken a lot of quotes and ideas and stitched them together in a way that is unique. He has in many ways created new data/information, new content. But the question remained what kind of content it is. In my last post on this I mentioned how the primary bones of this book are the Willard (Baptist)/Foster (quakers)/Ortberg (mega-church) and that is why something like church can become community and why the traditional sacraments of baptism and Lord’s supper are not primary. Here it is helpful to see how John Mark pulls from the Christian tradition, but the form of his content (the Spiritual formation movement) is driving how he uses and collects material along the way.
At the end reading the impressive and expansive list of quotes and thinkers he pulls together I could not have but wondering how much different the book would like if the bones were from a deep reader of Calvin, a catholic, or Stanley Hauerwas. If these became the bones over Willard et all it would be a much different book. And that’s part of the problem. The content and quotes aren’t quite making a whole. My frustration in the end is that the quotes seem to come as prooftexts for the shape he already has decided on. My hope is that a different thinker might be able to express the content of thinkers and quotes that it seems like they have bearing and are helping created the project rather than being summoned to support an idea in search of quote.
In ordering and presenting them as such John Mark has created something ‘new’ but I am just not sold we will hear the voices behind it and miss the message that otherwise might emerge.