Just learned that Amazon has found another way to slice and dice books: this time by “Most Highlighted Books of All Time” (based on Kindle activity).  *Almost Christian* is #643, slightly ahead of the Quran (#648) but behind Oliver Twist (#628) and Twilight (#588).  In overall highlighting, the Holy Bible (#2) lost out to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (#1).

Gotta say, I had no idea people highlighted fiction…

Coming in at #1101 is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic study Creativity, which I have assigned for class this week.  We’ll see if anybody in my seminar moves the needle on that one!

(Thanks to Christy Lang for showing me this!)

If you’re not a Hulu user, go register online (it’s free) and then watch this episode of FX’s “Louie.” The show is a mash-up of Louie C.K.’s stand up comedy routines and skits that are loosely based upon his life.  In this episode, which takes place in a Catholic school in 1977, young Louis become convinced that he is responsible for killing Jesus–until his mom tries to make him feel better by telling him that none of it is true.

Ouch.

Click here for the episode. You can skip to 6:20 (kids sitting in pew in the sanctuary) and watch through18:24 (Louis’s adult comedy routine).  Never mind the sit-com feel of the show;  these scenes are haunting, and they pretty much illustrate the dilemma of Christians who are trying to steer between “Jesus Camp” and “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  As Christy asked, “What does faith look like that is passionate, but not violent or guilt-inducing?”  Are fear or faithlessness our only options?

There are times I’ve felt like the humorless nun in the scene from “Louie,” pitching a serious point to a room full of snickers and rolled eyes.  And I admit to more satisfaction than I should have felt when a group of normally intransigent guys at our church watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ one year, leading one to admiringly say of Jesus:  ”Dude, that guy had guts.”

But most of the time I err on the side of Louis’s mother, trying to soothe away guilt, attempting to soften religion’s sharp edges, urging young people not to take their own sin too seriously.  ”You are a good kid” is my message most of the time–and I believe this is part of the good news Christ wants kids to hear.  God made them in God’s own image, which is to say that God made them good, very, very good, not because of who they are, but because of the God they reflect.

But there is more to the story.  To reflect the image of God takes more than we’ve got;  the world conspires against goodness, and children know it.  Youth are the first to sniff tension in the air, the first to feel shame, the first to absorb fear and its consequences.  Children know when something is wrong, and when we console them without naming sin for what it is (theirs or ours), we teach them to deny the moral compass that helps them discover God’s image in themselves and others.  They come to believe they are the only ones watching what they do, and (despite what Louie’s mother hopes) this is not a liberating discovery.  It is a millstone around their necks.  The image of God becomes so muddied that young people no longer recognize it in anyone, with disastrous consequences.

Were we to comfort Jesus, as Louis does–were we to want to make things better for Jesus–we would be taking out the nails in the hands and feet of all of those we have crucified over the centuries.  We would be binding people’s wounds and comforting those who suffer and “living the alternative,” as Peter Storey says, that the church is called to be in the world.  But to comfort Jesus requires us to have the very impulse that gets Louis in trouble:  remorse.

Garrison Keillor once observed that today we rationalize, we do not have remorse.  Remorse has become unfashionable–which is too bad, says Keillor, since remorse can motivate a world of good.  A twinge of guilt on the part of a careless lover can make him more thoughtful in the future.  A dose of shame from inserting ourselves at the head of the line can lead to more compassion next time.  A sense of regret for the sins of the world could lead churches to try to relieve some of them.  Frankly, a little remorse on the part of Christians would be (in my opinion) a step in the right direction.

Of course, when Louis’s mom tells him, “You are a good kid,” she is telling him the truth.  Yet she does not understand that Louie’s goodness stems from his image-of-God-ness, evidenced in his earnest desire to make the world right and remove the nails that cause Jesus pain.  Louie knows that he is broken, and that he must change to make things right;  this is the root of his remorse, and his redemption.  Yet Louie’s mom wants to spare him from remorse–which means she must deny that the image of God is in him, and nullify his faith.  It’s an understandable path to follow.  Louie won’t get in trouble again.

Which is a shame.

So here’s the most provocative question I’ve heard so far this year…compliments of Youthworker Movement (http://ywmovement.org) via Lars Rood.  (As you can see, I’m the last one to hear these things).  The question goes something like this:

If you were given the job of killing your church’s youth ministry this year–while giving the public impression that everything was going well–what would you do?

Great question.  Now here’s my follow-up:

Would your church more effectively disciple young people if you did kill youth ministry this year?

While you’re pondering, I’m in South Africa learning about youth and reconciliation with ten amazing seminarians and more than 100 pastors and scholars at the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry–and that’s just how the trip starts.  For the next couple weeks, you can find us at www.pts2sa.com…

I’m grateful for the many ways people are diving into Almost Christian--but above all, I have been blessed by the high school seniors who are weighing in.  You don’t get more honest critics than that.  Start with Lydia, my new friend who read it with her pastor dad before starting college at Princeton University this past fall, who is as full of life and hope and honesty as they come.

Then there are the high school seniors who have read it in class (in one case, I was told they actually chose to read it–go figure!), and who have contacted me in the process (more on that to come!)  And today I learned about this father-daughter blog, weighing in from Indianapolis, in case you want to follow their journey with me:  http://johnmeunier.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/the-great-father-daughter-tandem-book-blog/.

Now, if I can just get my own high school senior to read it!  ”MO-ommmmm….”

UGH.  That was one reaction to this article (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/#top), from the Chronicle of Higher Education (thanks, AZ, for sending!).  Surprise?  Not so much.  Here is the editor’s note about the article:

Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

Despite my freakishly idiosyncratic assignments, students have cheated in my classes.  Occasionally, they get caught.  The confrontations are awful in many ways, but mostly they are unspeakably sad.  In general, students defend their actions.  Handling an emergency, or the reality of overload, in a way that approaches a functional pastoral response (admit to being in over my head? ask for grace? pray for forgiveness?) does not occur to most of them.  Mostly, they cheat to cover their butts.  Saving face trumps the truth:  I was so busy.  I was so behind.  I had so many other things pressing.  I didn’t want to be late because you’d dock my grade.  I didn’t want a bad grade because it would disappoint someone I love, or maybe myself.

So forgive me for not finding the article’s following section shocking:

“I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.”

How has cheating become “the new normal” for students–even those preparing for Christian leadership?  (One potential clue:  My dentist knocks $10 off the price of a teeth-cleaning for any seminarian who can name the 10 Commandments.  He says he’s not losing much money.)

Maybe it’s our performance-crazed culture. Would it make a difference if an honest “C” felt better than an “A” by any-means-possible?  Maybe it’s laziness or that tired accusation about entitlement:  we’re not plagiarizing, we’re outsourcing.  Maybe students understand that success requires the art of compromise–but they lack the ability to distinguish between compromise and being compromised.  Or maybe cheating is the natural fallout of an anonymous, over-scheduled culture:  if people don’t know me, they won’t notice (or care) if I cheat (confirming social psychologists’ findings that our morality goes out the window when we think we won’t get caught).  Or maybe cheating is the consequence of locating all authority in ourselves.  One college student told me that he would never cheat in a class he cared about.  But all those meaningless requirements?  Why not?

At a dinner party not long ago, a mother (who did not know what I do for a living) gleefully shared how her daughter fabricated every word of the college essay that got her into an elite college on a full ride scholarship two years ago.  Now her daughter, a junior, is depressed, hates the school, and has serious doubts about being in college at all–and even expressed remorse to her mom about how she got there.  Her mom can’t understand it.  She told her daughter (I quote):  ”Who cares?  Your essay did what it was supposed to do.  It was beautifully written. It got you in, and paid for your college.  That’s what a college essay is supposed to do!”

Really?

I told the mom that I was proud of her daughter for having a conscience–knowing that this girl’s conscience was trapped in a Catch-22.  Should I obey my mother, whom I love, or obey my “inner uh-oh”–the word a friend of mine gives to those nerves in your stomach that intuit when things are not quite right?

No wonder every teenager I’ve ever asked assumes that almost everybody cheats.  If you’ve never talked to youth about the reasons their friends cheat, read this article and have at it. (Hint: asking teenagers to talk about their friends–without naming names–elicits more discussion than asking them to talk about themselves…though sometimes they talk about themselves in the process.)  Frame the discussion in a passage like Romans 2:21-24 or James 4:17.  Here’s what I’m wondering about, and what I think teenagers will say:

• Does anybody think cheating is wrong anymore? If they think it’s wrong, why do your friends cheat?  (my bet: pressure to succeed)  If they don’t think cheating is wrong, why not?  (my bet:  it doesn’t hurt anyone)
• Describe an instance of cheating or plagiarizing that you know about  (don’t use names).  What happened? (my bet:  everyone will have a story)
• Are you sympathetic to the article’s author?  Or does he make you mad?  Or both?  (my bet:  they’ll think he’s a slimeball, outing students without outing himself)
• Do teachers report cheating at your school?  Or are they selective about reporting it?  (my bet: most teachers don’t report unless it’s flagrant –and ”good” kids usually get away with cheating, even when they’re caught.  It’s the white collar crime of schools.)
• Do you think people plan to cheat, or do they just fall into it? (my bet:  they don’t plan to cheat)
• Can you cheat God?  How? (my bet:  they’ve never thought of this–neither had I till I read this article)

I have colleagues who feed every paper students write through dustball.com (a site that identifies published material in a paper) before grading.  I admit, I only do that when something sounds fishy–so I’m probably missing some of the cheating that has gone on under my nose.  I try to know my students, so I have a sense of their own voices–not so I can catch them at cheating (though this helps), but so I can help them discern when they are voicing their own sense of the world, or channeling someone else’s in such a way that makes them forget that God has given them gifts and purpose that are uniquely theirs.

Blessings in this Advent season–the season of Light and Truth.