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.

I’m going on almost two straight years of remote working now. To be honest, things are remarkably similar to how it was when we were in the office. But, on reflection, those similarities are mostly surface-level. There are some pretty significant differences that I’ve only started becoming aware of.

I’ll start by saying that my experience has taught me that my environment has a remarkably potent effect on me. I’m one of those people who love going to a coffee shop to write, not because I want the caffeine buzz (I do, but I can get that at home), but because I want the larger atmosphere/aura/vibe of the coffee shop, of which a caffeine buzz is one constituent part. It’s hard to unpack that completely, and it probably wouldn’t make sense to: it’s the alchemy of the whole coffee shop experience together that makes it an ideal place for me to write.

Likewise, when I read, I prefer a library. The key component there seems to be quiet, but again, I can have the quiet at home. There’s a larger composite experience going on that probably involves being surrounded by books, by other people concentrated on their own reading, by high ceilings and large open spaces with hidden nooks, etc. 

There is nothing terribly surprising or unusual about my preferring to write in coffee shops and read in libraries. It’s hard to conclude anything other than the apparent reality that these environments are constitutionally well-suited for those activities. They have most likely gradually been formed as those kinds of places by people who have had shared intuitions about what would create certain kinds of atmospheres, conducive to certain kinds of activity.

The same goes for offices. Obviously, there have existed plenty of offices that have been negative environments for one reason or another, just like there have existed coffee shops and libraries that have been poorly designed environments. But, in general, offices have been designed as places for people to work, and have more or less been successful in being that.

The shift to remote work for people in jobs conducive for it (like mine) happened so suddenly and so completely in March 2020 that it immediately forced each of us to become designers of our own work environments, even though that function has been executed collectively and gradually in the cases of public spaces like coffee shops, libraries, and offices. Some people are adept at creating good spaces for themselves to work from home; others, like myself, are getting there much more slowly through a process of trial-and-error. 

So, while work has mostly continued apace in the shift to remote work, there are some lurking effects at the mental/emotional/spiritual level that I think are still being fleshed out. To make sense of this, I’ve sought out some resources to enter into dialogue with on various areas that I think are going to become more of a focus in the near future with remote work.

1. Communication. Email has been a significant part of every white-collar worker’s life for years now. But, with remote work, it’s gone from a vital tool of communication to essentially the way to communicate. This isn’t just annoying; it’s also seriously detrimental to our productivity, focus, and even our mental health. An expert in “deep work,” Cal Newport, has talked at great length about how the constant pinging of our inboxes disrupts our consciousness in ways that essentially make our best creativity, which requires uninterrupted focus, impossible to access. But now, with remote work, we’re in a situation where we simply can’t turn the emails off, because they’re essential in even just communicating with our coworkers, who used to be down the hall.
   
   
2. Isolation. The constant influx of emails doesn’t even have the upside of lessening our loneliness. For that, we need meaningful interactions, which are simply more likely to happen in a shared physical setting, where we can linger in each other’s office doorways and together in shared spaces. This is an especially detrimental for introverts (such as myself), who can easily trick themselves into thinking that they don’t need these interactions—when, in fact, of course they do. Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet, has written about ways for those in positions of leadership to counteract the effects of isolation, especially when introverts are involved. Cain’s advice is good, but it’s just simply harder to be intentional about fostering meaningful social interactions in a work-from-home situation.
   
   
3. Clutter. Let’s face it: we can get away with more at home. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. Messes that we’re comfortable with can still be having a negative effect on our workspaces, even though we’re not noticing them because of a lack of self-consciousness. And, worse, there are other forms of clutter, as Joshua Fields Millburn, one half of “The Minimalists,” points out in their work. When we’re using physical spaces for work that are also used for other functions during non-work hours, clutter is that much more likely. Dedicated workspaces can be created at home, but it’s not always an option. The effects are wide-ranging: not only is work harder, but it’s less satisfying.
   
   
4. Overload. It’s harder to regulate yourself when you’re on an island. For some people, this means working less. For others, it means working more—often without even realizing it, as the beginnings and ends of our working hours become blurred with our work computer sitting right there at the kitchen table at all hours. The good news is that remote work also allows for the antidote to this problem, if we’re willing to be deliberate, as Cal Newport points out when he talks about intentionally slowing down and working at a capacity less than what we could theoretically handle. The result is less burnout and a healthier relationship with work.
   
   
5. Routine. Similar to the issue above, I’ve found that without structure to my days, I swing wildly between underfunctioning and overfunctioning. One of my favorite teacher mentor bloggers from my days in the classroom recommends establishing routines as a way to overcome this irregularity and ensure that you’re taking care of things that matter to you on a regular basis. I’ve noticed it’s also comforting to, say, start the day with an hour of reading with my mug of coffee. Lately, I’ve also been trying to work in some personal writing time in the afternoon. Notice that these routines have less to do with accomplishing work things and more to do with re-humanizing me as I work, sometimes robot-like, through my daily work tasks.

To be clear, I fully support remote work where possible in the context of a global pandemic. We need to make sacrifices for the sake of one another’s health and safety. And there are definite upsides to work-from-home, to the extent that I’d never want to go back to full-time in-person work. But we have to be honest about some of its differences and detriments too.

The good news is that, once we face these realities, we can counteract these with intentional choices and habits. That’s where I’m at now: trying to take stock of my situation and doing what I can to re-establish the balance that was previously provided for us. 

A number of my coworkers — myself included, to an extent — are recovering fundamentalists of some kind or another (exvangelicals, as those who emerged from the evangelical movement sometimes call themselves). Those who break free of some kind of fundamentalism tend to have a continuing leftward trajectory after their departure, in terms of their religious and political ideologies. Which makes perfect sense — if they were part of a right-wing movement that damaged themselves and others, they’d be naturally inclined to move the other direction.

One interesting exception to this trend though is that there is often some vestigial posture of fundamentalism that remains. In the world of publishing, this often manifests itself in my coworkers’ approach to grammar and other issues of style and usage.

Let me be clear: I’d take this kind of fundamentalism over the religious kind any day. I’m less bothered by it than fascinated and a little amused by it. It affects me a bit as a copywriter, but I mostly get to be a spectator as they debate whether the the before New York Times should be capitalized and italicized along with the rest of the title, or whether a distributive adjective is making a sentence too ambiguous or not. 

Rather than citing verses of the Bible, they cite rules from the Chicago Manual of Style. Rather than drawing fiery inspiration from the prophecies of Isaiah, they speak reverently of the words of Benjamin Dreyer from some chapter of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (a subtitle which I know is supposed to be taken tongue-in-cheekly but which I’m positive a few of my coworkers read in total earnest). And rather than using precepts of church doctrine to show whether a certain kind of behavior is or isn’t normative and acceptable, they share charts from Google Ngram to show whether a phrase is or isn’t “idiomatic.”

Is there a place for this sort of approach to writing? For sure. There are some things that are incorrect without any good reason for being so, and in those cases, it helps to have people who can spot the error and suggest a change. Particular contexts require particular conventions. But there’s a certain point where the conventions become no longer a means to an end (the end in question here being clarity and impact) but the end in and of itself. This despite the fact that the rules are all made up anyway — and will continue to be made up. (Someday, there will be an 18th edition of CMOS that will redefine what those who adhere to it consider “correct.”)

I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t go too much further. But it sure seems like some people have a need for something in their lives to be above reproach. A set of guidelines etched onto tablets by something other than a human hand. I know from experience that when you orient your entire life around something you consider to be inerrant truth, and then you find that it is anything but, it’s terrifying. There is suddenly a lack of order and meaning to the world around you. The temptation to plug that gaping hole with something, anything at all — even the rules of grammar — is immense. 

I work at a publishing company in West Michigan — for their sake and mine, I’ll keep them anonymous and refer to them as “the Press” — that publishes works by authors who write from an ideological background (usually Christianity) that is not my own. Being a copywriter, my job is specifically to engage with the books we’re publishing on a deep enough level that I’m able to write about them with a high degree of accuracy and understanding — and also sympathy. It wouldn’t be very good copy if I sounded like I was trying to distance myself from what the author is doing in her book. In fact, it’s not even enough to simply cosign on her arguments. I have to sound like the book is brilliant and groundbreaking and vital, without using those words or any other nakedly evaluative language. (That’s the endorsers’ and reviewers’ jobs.)

On the face of it, this might sound like a dicey career situation to be in and one that is terrible for fostering any sense of integrity. But I’ve been in this job for about two and a half years now, and I can honestly say that I’m not encumbered by any sense of nagging guilt or a sick feeling of having sold out and compromised my values. And I’m someone who has felt both of those things at numerous times throughout my life — so I’m confident it’s not for lack of self-examination. So I thought I’d reflect on a few aspects of what makes being a nonbelieving copywriter at a publishing house that frequently publishes confessional titles not only palatable, but even enjoyable and gratifying.

• The Press is a relatively small, independent company that has not been bought up by one of the big publishing juggernauts and turned into a thinly disguised imprint. Of course, profit is one of its raisons d’être, but the very fact of its having remained independent all this time despite lucrative offers for purchase by one of the Big Five speaks to its valuing its independence of perspective.
  
  
• There’s a clear sense that the Press is ideologically consistent and trustworthy. It’s not that we produce titles all from a certain perspective — we don’t. But there are clear criteria for a book being something we’re interested in and boundaries around what we’re not interested in. Most importantly, we’re not in the business of working with authors on any projects that are right-wing, nationalistic, conspiratorial, uncritical about systemic injustices, or using religion as a mask for bigotry. I can trust that I will never have to write copy for a book that tries to portray the 45th president of the United States as a savior of anything, or that uses dog-whistle language like “religious freedom” or “family values” to describe patriarchal, white-supremacist norms. (In fact, we regularly publish books that call out and expose these kinds of things in various areas of society.) It’s not that we have a perfect record — I know we have published problematic things. But there is a critical approach to what we put out and a concerted effort for integrity of vision.
  
  
• I don’t have to hide the fact that I’m nonreligious in the workplace. And I have several coworkers who are also nonreligious. An organization’s mission statement starts within its own walls, so this is important. Again, the Press isn’t perfect — it’s relative lack of diversity is a testament to shortcomings in its efforts to be truly inclusive. Nevertheless, it is clear that a person’s professional contributions are what is valued — not some litmus test about their identity or views.
  
  
• I do have my own background in the Christian tradition, and so I’m especially sympathetic to its aims and commitments — even as I have found them insufficient for myself. It would be dishonest to claim that Christianity was nothing but destructive in my life. It was that, but it was also formative. I respect that others might find it more the latter than the former, and I respect and value efforts to try to reform a faith to make it more like that for others.
  
  
• I’ve found embodying perspectives other than my own — again, within certain important boundaries — undeniably valuable. If this is exactly how I came to the realization back in my early adulthood that Christianity wasn’t for me, I’d be dishonest to say that growth can’t come the other way too — especially when it’s from certain traditions or backgrounds I’m less familiar with. I’ve found that alternate frameworks of thinking and living create space for things that I eventually come to appreciate.

Still, even with these points of justification, there are times I don’t especially enjoy, say, writing about why it’s important to justify and defend the doctrine of inseparable operations — that any action of one person of the holy trinity is undertaken also by the other two persons of the trinity — so that someone in an armchair somewhere can feel reassured that they are indeed a monotheist and not a heathen tritheist.

It would be ideal, of course, if I could work for a publisher whose worldview aligned more closely with mine. But that opportunity will likely not present itself in West Michigan anytime soon. I don’t feel the need to rationalize, though, because I find that my work reinforces something important in me: I’ll call it ideological humility. It’s the spirit I hope to be met with by those who hold different worldviews than mine, but it’s a spirit I too often fail to embody toward others. Being integrally engaged with other belief systems 40 hours a week forces this virtue upon me for at least that time — making it just the slightest bit easier to find that mindset when I need it outside the hours of eight to five, Monday through Friday.