The series’ features and organization

Introduction post 9 of 10

Good morning! In the book series’s penultimate introductory post, we look at the book series’ structure and features. We also pause to examine the nature of a biblical epigraph, which graces the first devotion of each series. To access the other posts that make up the introduction to Political Devotions, click its subtitle’s post number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

To housekeeping. (Even Arendt acknowledges the need for private spaces¹) I’d like to address five features of these devotions: their number, their order, their divisions, their study questions, and their epigraphs.

I started out to write an entirely discrete devotion for each day of the year, but the devotions became too long to fit 366 in a book series. I blame my task: writing something as singular as a political devotional meant that I couldn’t assume a body of commonly held tenets, which exists for most standard devotional works in the form of popular Christian theology. In each devotion, then, I attempt to explain as well as to provoke or inspire. I hope my readers find this expository groundwork, particularly the thoughts of the theologians and political theorists whom I quote and cite, as interesting as I do.

So I wrote an entry for each week of the year. A week, modeled after the Bible’s seven days of creation, seems something like the right amount time to digest, discuss, and perhaps act on a devotion.

I assign each month’s entries a single topic, such as thresholds, friends, and covenants. Each of these topics suggests what its month’s entries have in common, but those entries don’t exhaust the book series’s references to that topic. The twelve topics aren’t even the most prevalent subjects covered in the book series, which may be public space, creation, faithfulness, exile, and justice. The topics suggest the book series’s organization, but I hope they don’t make the reader anticipate what many Christians call “line-upon-line” instruction.² I explain only as much as I must in these fifty-two devotions from my own unsystematic reading.

Although the series’s organization by months and weeks suggests a front- to-back reading, the reader may as profitably read the entries in any order. The devotional entries are cross-referenced, too: if an entry refers to a concept more thoroughly explained in an earlier entry, I refer to that entry in a footnote by its entry number (e.g., “Week 14”).

Most of the devotions are divided into smaller sections. I chunk a devotion to make its material easier to consider over the week’s days. A division by horizontal line suggests a more significant shift in thought than a paragraph break would signify. A division by Roman numeral, though, suggests a significant shift in narrative or argument. These enumerated sections are still associated by the devotion’s title, and I hope that the reader will realize other associations among the sections by the devotion’s end.

The discussion questions at the end of each devotion don’t test the reader’s close reading but suggest new ways of exploring the material, often by introducing different sources on the same topic as the devotion in question. Many of the questions elicit a book group member’s individual responses to parts of a devotion’s material to encourage the group’s activity as a community of interpretation. Also, I don’t add “Why or why not?” to any of the questions. I figure that in a community of interpretation, such follow-up questions will arise in conversation when the community needs them. Finally, I hope also that these communities ask and attempt to answer other questions that I haven’t asked.

Matching a biblical epigraph to a devotion was both tricky and fun, like assigning guests’ seats ahead of a large dinner. The practice of finding epigraphs also occasionally allowed me to indulge in a certain exoticism. Some of my epigraphs aren’t well known and seem lost without their textual contexts. I claim the high road, however: like the author and Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon, I don’t wish to perpetuate “the neglect of even the oddest bit of Scripture.”³

A devotion’s epigraph may have either a direct or a tangential relationship to its series’s subject. My favorite epigraphs are generally the tangential ones. Some theories or doctrines claim hegemony based on how many scriptures they can account for—that is, by how many scriptures they can put in their service. Sometimes those doctrines help me understand some of those scriptures in a new and striking light. But sometimes those doctrines—even the best ones—limit the power of those scriptures to help us see ourselves, our God, and our community in ways those doctrines do not anticipate or perhaps even approve of. So with some of my tangential epigraphs, I do my small part in setting some of those scriptures free.

Letting the epigraph and the reader negotiate the epigraph’s relation to the devotion’s content seems to honor what Walter Brueggemann calls “the interplay between normative and the imaginatively playful that gives the text its obviously transformative energy.”⁴ This playfulness can amount to a subversion of dominant ideas about a chosen epigraph, too, irrespective of any doctrine’s claim on the passage. This playfulness can thereby, though its biblical epigraph, provide a sense of volume to the two-dimensional text it headlines, just as literary critic Roland Barthes’s notion of “dominant ideology” (his version of a “normative” concept) provides the same to his text:

The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds, subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.⁵

Barthes’s shadows add ideology; mine challenge received ideology.

This is the ninth of ten posts that make up the book series’s introduction. Click here to read the introduction’s last installment.

1. Arendt, Human Condition, 73.

2. “But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line . . .” Isaiah 28:10-13 KJV.

3. Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, 2.

4. Brueggemann, “Preface to First Edition,” xii (italics in the original).

5. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 32.