Disconnected
The Devil Reads Derrida, and Other Essays On the University, the Church,
Politics, and the Arts
by James K. A. Smith
Eerdmans, 2009
(163 pages, $18.00, paperback)
reviewed by Micah Mattix
I was unsure, at first, whether I wanted to read, much less review, James K. A. Smith’s collection of essays, The Devil Reads Derrida. It is not that I have something against Derrida. Smith rightly argues elsewhere that figures such as Derrida and Foucault are neither devils nor saints, and are often misunderstood. But to be honest, I am beginning to tire of references to them in books of theology. In English studies, Derrida has been out of fashion for more than a decade now, and I am hoping that the “critical” fire will soon die out in theology, along with all the breezy references to “postmodernism.”
Thankfully, Smith’s book has very little to do with Derrida, and there are, indeed, a number of things to laud in this eclectic collection of musings on things as varied as Harry Potter, the Sabbath, higher education, and the poetry of Franz Wright. In his reflection on the Sabbath, for example, Smith reminds us that “we spurn the gift of God’s rest in all kinds of ‘holy’ ways,” and in his review of Wright’s poetry, he highlights the central paradox in much of Wright’s recent work—that it is in moments of “silence” that God “speaks volumes.”
Somewhat surprisingly, however, Smith is at his best on what I would call “pastoral” topics. In his essay on doubt, for example, he argues that faith does not ignore the suffering in the world, but faces “the tragic nature of a broken world” while looking to Christ for sustenance. In a short piece on manhood, Smith calls John Ellredge to task for conflating biblical manhood with the Hollywood manhood of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace; and in a fun, insightful piece on popular culture, he gives his reasons for not seeing The Passion of the Christ, ever. His short ripostes against the consumerist model of higher education and the effects of the Fall, among other things, keep the book moving at a chipper pace.
Spurred by a Gap
But there are also problems, and some pretty major ones at that. What impelled Smith to write the pieces that comprise the book was the furor that erupted when President George W. Bush was invited to give the commencement address at Calvin College in 2005. A number of faculty members and students opposed the invitation, and a number of alumni supported it, but what struck Smith was that those in support were “aghast that so-called ‘Christian’ scholars could even entertain such a critique of the President and would see any sort of tension (let alone contradiction) between the Bush administration’s foreign and economic policies and a ‘biblical’ worldview.” This highlighted a gap between the school’s scholars and its past students. “How is it,” Smith writes,
that there could be such a disconnect between what some of the college’s leading scholars and teachers thought and what our constituency (made up of mostly alumni who had been taught by these same scholars and teachers) took to be the shape of a Christian worldview?
Well, for Smith, the reason is actually pretty simple: They just don’t know any better. As Reformed scholars have focused on their respective areas of expertise, he explains,
Christians within the denomination found themselves looking for wisdom and guidance where they could get it. The result is that they picked up what was available—in Christian bookstores, magazines, and, perhaps most significantly, on Christian radio. And since Christian intellectuals had pretty much vacated these spaces, the result is that the Christian public began to nourish themselves with what I have to say is a largely unhealthy diet.
Thus, casting aside “academic elitism,” Smith undertook the task of writing the journalistic pieces found in the book to reach out to these “‘ordinary’ Christians.”
Micah Mattix is a Lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the review editor of The City, a new journal of Christian thought from Houston Baptist University. He and his wife are members of the Church of the Apostles (AMiA) in Raleigh, North Carolina. They have four children.
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