After thinking about the idea of public-facing scholarship — the idea that the work done in the academy must be for the benefit of the broader public outside the academy — I find myself thinking about the same thing with regard to religion and the way the authors the Press publishes do or do not embody public-facing faith. 

What would it mean to have a public-facing faith? Considering what it means in the world of academic scholarship, I would think it would require the way someone shares their faith and faith-based insight to be for the benefit of those outside the particular religious community.

I’ll pause here for an important aside: many Christians, especially of the evangelical variety, might hear that and think of the idea of “witnessing,” also known as proselytizing. That is not what I mean here by public-facing faith. Despite the fact that writing done in the apologetic mode is indeed targeted toward an external audience, the purpose is still to serve the in-group — precisely because the goal of such writing is to lure and assimilate the external target audience into the in-group. The equivalent of this in public-facing scholarship would be a kind of discourse that invites/coerces people into academia. While there may be limited value in this mode of discourse, it would not be seen as an essential function of academic work; nor should it be in religion.

What I mean by public-facing faith, then, is not only faith-based discourse that speaks to an external audience but also faith-based discourse respects the divide, even while attempting to bridge it rhetorically in pursuit of the communication of truth that is relevant and valuable to both groups.

So the question is: does it happen? At the risk of copping out, I’ll say sort of. Well, maybe, barely. The reality is that, at least within the worlds of Christianity that I’m familiar with, most discourse is by and for Christians.

Market forces are a big factor here. The reality is that religious texts for non-religious people just don’t seem to be in very high demand. It makes sense: Christians accept some key premises that non-Christians don’t, so the writer would be starting in a different place than the reader — making for quite an odd reading experience.

There is one area especially that public-facing faith has started happening, especially just in the past few years: evangelical studies. When the forty-fifth president was elected, it happened largely because of the support of eighty-one percent of white evangelicals. Even though the connection between outwardly religious people and a blustering, incompetent demagogue was bewildering to many, even in spite of recent historical allegiances of white evangelicals to the Republican party. 

Journalistic analysis responded to the demand for understanding to an extent, but no one could respond to the demand as well as those who had emerged from within the evangelical world. The insight of these authors has been as cutting as it is empathetic, because they understand first-hand the allure and danger of white evangelicalism’s alliance with right-wing American political power. The Press has published several of these kinds of books, but the best-known have come from other publishers: books like Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler. 

So, for now at least, those interested in having a public-facing faith have been able to help the nation process its collective trauma endured since 2016 (or, arguably, earlier). Are there other contributions a public-facing faith can make? One such attempt is being made by those who find essential connections between the Christian tradition and social justice movements. Those doing so find encouragement and legitimacy in the historical link between Christianity and abolitionism, for example. (Of course, in doing so, they have to contend with the contradictory historical link between Christianity and slavery.)

My overarching question is whether public-facing faith can provide anything into social justice discourse that isn’t already available from other sources — especially the lived experience of those at the receiving end of injustice (although of course there is a great deal of crossover here for Christians in marginalized groups — take, for example, Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley). 

I’m skeptical about the growth potential of public-facing faith, but I do think the attempt itself is valuable in making our world a less insular place, where people of different groups actually engage one another in dialogue. 

Something I’ve noticed during my time in publishing is that the editing process is not what I thought it was — and probably not what it should be. I’ll add the disclaimer that my perspective is obviously limited, but I’ve heard similar things anecdotally from around the publishing industry. I’ll also add that there are legitimate reasons that editing is not what it should be: namely, limited resources. I don’t claim to have any solutions to that significant obstacle. But I do have a manifesto for what editing would look like (and not look like) in an ideal world.

1. Your book is probably already brilliant.
   There’s a reason you’re so excited about your book: it really is brilliant. You provided form to your formless imagination, and it now has its own life in words that other people can read. You have done nothing less than immortalized a piece of your soul. No editor could ever do this for you.
   
   
2. People will probably not be able to tell that your book is brilliant without editing.
   It’s also true that people might read your book and not sense any of that because all of that brilliance is obscured through ineffective writing. A good editor will be someone who recognizes the brilliance of your book while also acting as a less-enlightened reader — and bridging that gap, guiding you in helping your book to convey its brilliance to a broader audience. Sorry: you are inherently able to do this for your own book.
   
   
3. Editing is not a one-time exchange.
   A common perception of editing is that it means the author handing the manuscript over to the editor, and the editor marks it up and returns it for the author. This “process” is about as likely to lead to entrenched conflict between the author and the editor as it to lead to any positive, meaningful change.
   
   
4. Editing is ongoing and relational.
   Editing only really works if it’s a conversation. Power should be equally distributed between author and editor, so every exchange should be give-and-take. The relationship between the two people involved should be at the center of the process.
   
   
5. Editing is not a quick, supplemental step in the writing process.
   Deadlines are realities in the world of book creation, but the power of editing will be severely limited if it’s forced into a formulaic length of time, as though it were a standardized segment of an assembly line. Editing is more than quality control or due diligence on the part of the publisher before the book goes to the printer.
   
   
6. Editing should take longer than writing.
   Longer lengths of time are intrinsically valuable with editing, just as they are with writing. Breaks in the process are where the best thinking happens. If the author needs these pauses in work while writing, the editor needs them too — the mind must work creatively in editing as it does in writing.
   

7. Editing is not narrow.
   Proofreaders are valuable people in the creation of a book. But editors are not proofreaders. The idea that editors catch “errors” is a bad stereotype. This reductionism seems part of a larger trend of deprofessionalization — the attempt to remove gray areas from expert-level work.
   
   
8. Editing is big-picture.
   Editors must be working positively toward an artistic vision that is subjective and non-formulaic. This vision will differ from the author’s, but the interaction between the two can provide the alchemy needed for editing to be truly transformational.
   
   
9. Editing is not destructive.
   When editors at their worst, they become the author’s worst nightmare: someone out to pick apart their work until a skeletal vestige remains. When editors serve only legalistic directives — like getting a book to a “readable” length — this is exactly the sort of dynamic established. The editor’s desk becomes a butcher’s block where entire chapters can end up discarded so that a book can become “marketable.”
   

10. Editing is generative.
    True editing should always be adding to a book, even when it is deleting words. The question should always be at the forefront of the editor’s mind: what would be created if this change were made? And if the relational aspect of editing is honored, the editor’s work may compel the author to create further, enacting a virtuous cycle of mutually inspired generativity. Thus, the editor becomes a co-creator without ever diminishing the author’s creative ownership.

When I talk to my coworkers in the acquisitions department at the Press, I notice a frequent disconnect: there are the ideas they are passionate about, and then there are the ideas in the books they acquire. Sometimes there is overlap — and, when there is, it’s exciting to hear the passion in their voice as they introduce the book to their colleagues in marketing and sales. But just as often there is either the approximation of passion or the frank admission that this is something they acquired because it will make the Press a great deal of money.

Now, as I mentioned in the first post, I’m proud of the fact that the Press has an ideological line in the sand. It’s different from my line, of course, but it’s one the Press has adhered to consistently throughout its long history — even when, beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, most of the money to be made in religious publishing of the particularly Christian variety was to be found across that line.

But across the board my colleagues in editorial are either progressive or progressive-leaning moderates, and we regularly publish books that are religiously conservative and orthodox, especially in our biblical commentary series. I could get into the ethics of giving a platform to rigid and narrow — and therefore potentially damaging — interpretations of the Christian faith (I’m conflicted on this), but the point I want to reflect on in this post is that disconnect: what does it mean for a system that encourages people to produce what is profitable over what is valuable?

We’re not the only publishing company that is faced with this conundrum, and publishing isn’t the only industry faced with it. It seems to be endemic to a capitalist system. The ideal situation, of course, is when the profitable and the valuable overlap — but this doesn’t happen as often as we’d hope it would.

I know at least one of my colleagues sees this as a tradeoff: we publish what we need to in order to then publish what we want to. Fair enough. But means-to-an-end approaches like that are notoriously deceptive and counterproductive. 

If you take the system at face value, it seems that this is the best we can hope for. But I was inspired last week in essays by Corey Robin and Mark Greif and their idea of scholars creating the audiences they are speaking into. This challenges my preconceived idea of a publishing company like the Press having pre-existing groups of readers that will like or dislike a book based on what has already been published. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s already true that a small publishing company like the Press has a following for its own sake. There is a specific kind of reader that seeks out our books — they have a little bit of overlap with readers of the New York Times, but they’re different too — both more institutional. I wonder sometimes if the Press ceased to exist what would happen to those readers: would they be drawn instead toward one or the other poles that exist on either side of the Press, or would they just withdraw? To some extent, the uncertainty in the question reflects the reality that we are already creating our audience. 

So why not do it intentionally? It can be hard as a publisher (or any other platform) because you only have secondary control over the content you’re creating — it’s the creation of curation. There are moral responsibilities in curation (as has become apparent in the Spotify/Joe Rogan debacle recently), but there are also artistic opportunities. Rather than having the Press be merely a gatekeeper, the brand and collection can become a kind of meta-text.

We’ve begun doing this with a series about the future of theological education, for which the acquisitions recruited a diverse roster of authors who have each cast their vision for what is next for seminaries and divinity schools. Through a series of conscious and coordinated decisions (editing, design, marketing, etc.), the series has transcended the role of container and become more than the sum of its parts. Rather than it being twelve books saying twelve different things, it becomes twelve voices in dialogue with one unified series.

What’s stopping a publisher like the Press from doing something similar? Why can’t we be honest about how the lines blurb between text and context, between author and editor, between voice and platform, between art and commodity? Transcending the entire system of capitalism is too pie-in-the-sky right now to be a meaningful idea. The capitalist system is what we have — but that doesn’t mean we need to be at its mercy.

There’s a lot more to say about working from home, so I want to reflect on it at a more philosophical level — especially with regard to isolation. What does it mean to have a workplace of one’s own, even while working as part of a company and part of the larger economy (of both the nation and the world). Are we who work from home destined to the forces of atomization, so that, even as we contribute to something bigger than ourselves, we’re more and more limited to a consciousness only of our own experiences?

In the previous post, I turned to contemporary bloggers for dialogue partners. In this one, I’d like to turn to one of the most well-known solitary beings in history: Henry David Thoreau. What would Thoreau say about remote work?

On one hand, it’s a silly question. Thoreau would likely have quit well before the point of having to make sense of work-from-home as a way of life, having a negative opinion of office-type work particularly for its tendency to cultivate what a “new class of men . . . working mentally rather than physically on problems and opportunities that had not existed twenty years earlier.” (1)

The answer, believed Thoreau, was a connection with nature to restore the wholeness of the bifurcated self — so that intellectual work might be accompanied by the physical labor of subsistence.

Of course, in Thoreau’s mind, this meant moving away from the city and living off the land as much as one could, as he did at Walden. In an ideal world, this sounds like a nice way to live. But the reality is that it requires a certain degree of privilege — as it did in Thoreau’s day too. This manifested in Thoreau’s writing in a certain degree of contempt for anyone other than unattached males of certain means — those who could manage, economically and socially, to move away from population centers to live in a solitary fashion.

So much for Thoreau offering us democratic, equitable insight in the age of remote work. However, it’s worth pointing out that with WiFi and VPNs, some sort of hybrid model in which people could live a semi-Thoreauvian rural existence, even with the domestic responsibilities of a family, while still holding down a full-time job. Indeed, many are already doing this — moving to states like Idaho and West Virginia to escape the clamor of the big city while still remaining employed at companies in Chicago, LA, NYC, etc. Knowing Thoreau, he would probably have seen this as a watered-down compromise, but I’m sure he would’ve been at least intrigued.

Nevertheless, this isn’t the most helpful insight that Thoreau has to provide us in the age of remote work. For that, we need to turn to something more like metaphysics. 

Thoreau, along with another famous solitary, William Wordsworth, conveyed an idea in their writing that has been referred to by Jerome Tharaud as “cosmic localism.” (2) This is the idea that a particular place can become a microcosm of wholeness and totality. For Thoreau, this was Walden. For Wordsworth, this was his home in Cumbria, England. While both Thoreau and Wordsworth lived mostly (but not entirely) solitary existences in these places, neither could have said to be fetishizing isolation for its own sake. Paradoxically, both actually saw their solitary relationships with a place as the most effective path to authentic social connection.

In Wordsworth’s Prelude, he writes about places and features of places as something that can be entered into dialogue with, not because of some animistic spirituality but because of the way the place has been inhabited by people before — including his past selves. Thus, there is always some relational dynamic present, all the more if it’s a place one has grown familiar with and more attuned to its “ghostly language.” 

Of people’s homes, Wordsworth later wrote, “Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would otherwise be forgotten. It is a fountain fitted to the nature of social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was intended for, are daily drawn.” (3) While this certainly has the effect of giving someone a sense of fixedness and security in the ever-moving stream of time, it also gives one an ever-present connection to other humans, regardless of whether other humans are actually present at any given moment.

Surely, at its worst, this sense of locational solidarity can substitute for actual human connection, but Wordsworth was intentional about not seeing it that way. Besides dedicating The Prelude to his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth likely also saw the poem itself and even his daily solitary life in Cumbria as an ongoing attentiveness to his love for Coleridge. Jasmine Jagger goes even further, writing that Wordsworth seemed to see his life in Cumbria as providing vicarious grounding to Coleridge’s rootless, troubled life. (4)

In an age when we’ve never been more connected while never feeling more alone, Wordsworth’s approach to solitude seems insightful. But a key problem remains: when we’re working from home, we’re not wandering through nature or writing poetry or even reminiscing: we’re working at our computers. So even if Wordsworth provides us the promise that our isolation is not necessarily a precursor of loneliness, the Wordsworthian approach doesn’t actually offer a workable path forward to connection in the age of remote work.

For that, we turn back to Thoreau. While Thoreau certainly had his metaphysical moments, he was also eminently practical. In some ways, Walden almost functions as an instruction manual — one that might be applied in modified form to our 2022 work-from-home situations. Here are some Thoreauvian tips I find myself mulling over especially:

• Make the space intentionally undesirable. Maura D’Amore writes, ““Thoreau sought to prove that even a less-than-desirable lot by society’s standards could be transformed into something singularly valuable: an opportunity to focus on the self and its needs and on the pleasures of perception and imagination.” (5) I don’t know if I buy this, but this certainly relates back to the idea of clutter I discussed in the last post.
  
  
• Don’t get stuck. Thoreau always intended his life on Walden Pond to be a temporary experiment. He ended up being there two years. This wasn’t, as some claimed, a lack of fortitude on Thoreau’s part, but a deliberate decision to avoid stagnation. At the end of his time at Walden, he writes, “It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” The specific applications here aren’t important: we could either take this to mean that we should take up a new job after a certain amount of time or that we should avoid set routines that become the point in and of themselves, rather than a means to an end.
  
  
• Cultivate ritual and routines. Lana Henry describes Thoreau’s habits — including bathing in the pond, preparing food, and cleaning his homestead — as “domestic sacraments” that created unity and rhythm in Thoreau’s life. (6) Interestingly — and perhaps to Thoreau’s dismay — Henry points out how Thoreau’s domestic rituals broke down traditional gender distinctions in his own life. She writes, “His homemaking experiment in the woods combined an American ideal of maleness—a rugged pioneering New Adam—with the Victorian era’s idealized and feminized world of sacralized domesticity.” While Thoreau would likely never have embraced this insight, it seems perfectly in line with his quest to make himself a more complete human — one that might better transcend categories of gender and social station.
  

If I were to sum up Thoreau’s greatest potential influence on my remote-work life, I would say that’s it: the aspiration to be a whole human, rather than one defined merely by certain aspects of myself — say, my intellectual capacity — as I sit working at my computer.

This is one of the major ironies of work-from-home: we can finally go anywhere and become anyone while still working full-time, but so often, we end up going fewer places and becoming even more limited version of ourselves. There are specific considerations here, to be sure — caregiving responsibilities, employer monitoring, relative levels of privilege that might limit or enable us in various ways, etc. — but the truth is that we all have the capacity to make deliberate choices that make us more whole and more connected to other humans, even — and, paradoxically, maybe even especially —  while working in literal isolation.

I’m still figuring out what that can look like in my own work life. The thing I’ve been exploring the past couple weeks in this direction has been the cultivation of routine and ritual. I have always tried to begin my day with coffee and reading — and I’ve also found it hard not to get distracted, especially by the internet. (“Let me just look up this one thing I came across in my book . . .” We all know how that goes.) So, something I’ve found is that going to a coffee shop first thing in the morning to do this reading is helpful to avoid that. Something about the atmosphere makes me feel more inclined toward sustained reading. 

This is also a great way to cross paths with a few fellow humans to start my day. Granted, it’s right after the coffee shop in question opens, so the only person there is usually the barista (which is generally a plus for me with Covid still ongoing), but there’s still something about just having the interaction it takes to buy my cup of coffee that sets the tone for my day.

A routine I’ve had for a bit longer is taking my dog for a run sometime around the middle of the day. This has all the benefits that exercise provides, and it also breaks up the day. It’s not exactly the same as the two-year experiment of living on Walden Pond, but it’s still an antidote to stagnation in its own way. I know my dog appreciates it too, and there’s a certain degree of satisfaction that comes from doing something that provides her joy.

The last “routine” (in quotation marks because I’ve missed it more times than not — many more times than not) is an afternoon writing break. The idea is to drop whatever I’m doing and take fifteen minutes to an hour to write. The reality is that it doesn’t usually feel feasible to do amid a somewhat hefty workload. But the times I’ve done it have felt great. Granted, I’m writing for work too, but there’s something about writing what I choose to write for a change that helps me reclaim myself in a small way. 
The writing thing is important to me for one last reason — that it connects me to people outside of myself or my small work circle. Who? I don’t really know. Kind of like how Wordsworth didn’t always know who he felt connected to in his communion with nature. But there’s always something mystical happening when you open a blank document and begin writing — not for an assignment, not out of a sense of obligation, but because you feel a lingering desire to say something. In some ways, there’s nothing more human than that. And that’s exactly the thing I need to feel — need to know — after yet another week at my home workstation. That I am more than a copywriter, more than an employee, and I hear and be heard by all the other more-thans any time I need. Ironically — but not surprising to readers of Thoreau — I’ve found that that’s something I can make happen by sacralizing my mundane workday.

1. Maura D’Amore. “Thoreau’s Unreal Estate: Playing House at Walden Pond.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1, Mar. 2009, pp. 56-79. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20474707. 
   
   
2. Jerome Tharaud. “‘So Far Heathen’: Thoreau, the Missionary Memoir, and Walden’s Cosmic Modernity.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 59, no. 4, 2013, pp. 618-61. Project MUSE, DOI: 10.1353/esq.2013.0034.
   
   
3. Christopher Donaldson. “Evoking the Local: Wordsworth, Martineau and Early Victorian Fiction.” Review of English Studies, vol. 64, no. 267, Nov. 2013, pp. 819-37. Oxford Academic, doi.org/10.1093/res/hgt004.
   
   
4. Jasmine Jagger. “Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Healing Powers of the Imagination.” Romanticism, vol. 22, no. 1, 2016, pp. 33-47. Edinburgh University Press, DOI: 10.3366/rom.2016.0255.
   
   
5. D’Amore, “Thoreau’s Unreal Estate.”
   
   
6. Lana Henry. “Chapter One: At Home ‘Between the Earth and the Heavens’: Henry David Thoreau and Walden.” Healing America on the Altar of Home: The Folklore and Sacred Work of Homemaking in Thoreau, Jewett, and Steinbeck. Dissertation, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2004, pp. 45-109. UMI: 3153726. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.