Status Updates From Biblical Porn: Affect, Labo...

yeah holy fuck

I don’t know what I expected from this book. I do know, however, that I did not expect a clinical, academic paper that reads more like a thesis than a narrative story. I’m only on page 39, though. I’ll review in full when I’m done.

This books is about to get spicy

Useful quotes from former Mars Hill members make up for the unreadable technical prose.

The author explores the techniques used by church leadership to generate the "excess affect" (it's even in the subtitle, I just noticed) that allowed Mars Hill to grow so explosively. I'm fortunate that none of the churches I attended marshalled all these techniques as fully. But it's clear to me that Paul Wagner at Believers Chapel was channeling Mark Driscoll when he called for wives to "put out" more.

Reading about Mark Driscoll in the 2000s I can see now that many people around me at that time were very influenced by him. A pastor here in Syracuse telling his congregation one Sunday that husbands committed adultery because their wives didn't put out enough is my favorite example.

I do respect this author and I am benefiting from the book but the jargon in the intro was hard to take. For example, she spent three full pages explaining, in sociological terms, what a "laugh" was. It might have been helpful except that, either through my failure or hers, I didn't understand it.

To read these first few pages of the introduction I've had to do a lot of reading on the side about Foucault. Now I know what "biopower" is. I am forcing myself to try to find actual meaning in this soft-science technobabble. I just need to contextualize some intersectionalities in my worlding, I guess. Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe...

I started by reading the conclusion and notes. Now I'm wrapping around to the beginning. The book is about Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll. I keep running across references to the story but want to get the whole thing. I will try to learn the sociology terminology and not just slide over it.