Framing Our Attention
Jeffrey Bilbro’s new book on reading the news offers a helpful corrective to our habits of fragmenting our attention between the many streams of modern news and media.
Review by Hayden Kvamme
As a pastor of a politically diverse congregation, I’m careful about relating the gospel to current events. Usually, I just don’t. For one thing, I’m not much good at following the news. Disillusioned with TV broadcasts, overwhelmed by the cost and frenetic pace of national digital sources, and lacking quality local options, I did not even attempt to follow the news until coming to my current church. Yet I recognize that to be an effective pastor and person, I must follow the news somehow, not least to gain some perspective on the big stories that are likely on parishioners’ hearts and minds. And of course, there are moments when it is imperative to bring voices of faith to bear on pressing issues. How to begin to navigate all this? These are some of the questions and concerns that framed my own reading of Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News by Jeffrey Bilbro.
As a parent, I was delighted to see in Bilbro’s dedication that the breaking news Bilbro most faithfully attends to is his daughter’s insistent reporting: “Look at me, Daddy!” This is not just a cute quip, but the beginning of an excellent frame for the book, which proceeds to answer three questions: “To what should we attend? How should we imagine and experience time? How should we belong to one another?” Each of the book’s three parts analyzes the inadequate answers to these questions offered by our “contemporary media ecosystem,” offers a theological approach to the topic, and identifies specific practices to help one “cultivate a healthier posture toward the news.” This careful organization yields memorable, fruitful insights. I especially appreciated Bilbro’s inclusion of suggested practices.
Bilbro argues that attention focused on endless daily news cycles easily becomes fragmented, focuses on trivial realities, and leaves one ignorant of local neighbors. Bilbro suggests that if TV news broadcasts are tootsie rolls, and TED Talks are macaroons, then we are in desperate need of some hearty vegetables. These might include, for instance, thoughtful journalism, long form essays, good (old) books, and local print journalism, all of which have the potential to reframe our attention on the issues we sense God calling us to focus on. Bilbro’s critique of our media environment leads into his more thorough critique of our fragmented approach to time, in which we alternate between too much emphasis on the lives of elites and too much emphasis on the arc of history. For Christians, weekly worship and the liturgical calendar provide ways of reorienting our relationship to time and history, focusing on hope for all people, but not necessarily on progress easily measured over time.
In his response to the question of belonging, Bilbro advises subscribing “aspirationally” to monthly or quarterly journals formed, perhaps, by actual communities of Christians living together, or at least by people of faith or other thoughtful groups of journalists connected through other means, less focused on daily news. This approach, Bilbro argues, will broaden our perspective more than trying to read from diverse sources, which, according to Bilbro, is more likely to simply confirm our biases.
No doubt the acts of God in history are difficult to discern, but there is and ought to be a correlation between the arc of human history and the arc of salvation history.
All of this is good as far as it goes. I would even venture to say that I practice much of what Bilbro suggests. Earlier this year I deleted my Facebook app from my phone. We don’t have a television. I take daily walks through my neighborhood. I’ve recently picked up a few minor wood-working projects. I make efforts to attend to my family, my neighborhood, and my city. I worship, pray, and do chores on a regular basis. I’ve identified some key issues important to me (e.g., racism in America). I’ve cultivated those interests mainly by reading books (e.g., The New Jim Crow, The Color of Law, Just Mercy, The Christian Imagination) rather than by becoming glued to my phone for the latest updates on any number of stories. I’m subscribed to multiple quarterly Christian journals that comment on the news. I say this not to toot my own horn, but because I find I’m still left with all kinds of questions and challenges.
To name a few, if one prioritizes local news over regional or national news, as Bilbro suggests, how should one follow local news? Rejecting local television news broadcasts, Bilbro expresses an optimism about the current state of local print journalism that I don’t share. Secondly, granted most of us should spend far less time on Facebook and Twitter, let alone surfing the news on other applications or websites, is one to embrace any daily practice for following national or international news? If so, what might Bilbro suggest? This might seem like a naïve question, but Bilbro’s argument tees this question up without offering a clear response to it.
Secondly, for all Bilbro’s talk of Providence, I was sometimes left as I read with the impression that, outside the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s acts in history are nearly impossible to discern. Bilbro does well to attend to humanity’s fallen state, situate Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection at the center of God’s victorious redemption, and clarify that our hope is eschatological and eternal rather than merely temporal. I wonder, though, whether Bilbro offers a sufficient frame to attend to everything between creation and the incarnation (especially the story of Israel and the nations), let alone to everything between the incarnation and the new creation. This latter span would include the entire development of Christianity in the West and beyond. Presumably noticing God at work in history has at least something to do with tracking this arc, however much we might wonder when and where the church has failed or succeeded in its witness. No doubt the acts of God in history are difficult to discern, but there is and ought to be a correlation between the arc of human history and the arc of salvation history. Ignoring this makes it all but impossible as a Christian to find anything noteworthy in daily news from a providential standpoint. Bilbro rightly tempers any feverish desire for the victories of “our side” to be synonymous with God’s victories. But to all-but-bifurcate time and eternity risks falling into the trap Bilbro himself lays, namely, to give no weight at all to the arc of history. In particular, I might have expected Bilbro to lean deeper into two of his sources for his treatment of these themes, namely Jamie Smith and Willie Jennings. Doing so may have led to a more fruitful literary inquiry into the news.
All of this said, Reading the Times has much to offer any reader hoping to practice reading the news theologically. For any news junky looking for a way out of endless scrolling or constant edginess regarding contemporary issues, Reading the Times will serve as healing balm, and a much-needed reminder of Christian hope.
Hayden Kvamme is the pastor in residence at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa, where he shared in all aspects of pastoral ministry. Ordained as a pastor in 2019, Hayden graduated from Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, IA, where he wrote his thesis, The Character of the Justified Sinner: A Christological Account of the Formative Power of Worship in conversation with James K. A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgies series.
Reading the Times will be released by IVP Academic on June 8, 2021. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advanced copy for our reviewer. You can order a copy of your own on their website here.
