So it’s 2022 and this here blog started out 20 years ago in 2002. In celebration of all those twos and zeroes — and as a way of ensuring more frequent threads — we’ll be posting On This Day flashbacks throughout the year.
This is from January 2, 2008, “Before the Internet“:
Fast-forward five years, to a seminary class on Christian faith and economics. We’re reading, among other things, Amy L. Sherman’s Preferential Option: A Christian and Neoliberal Strategy for Latin America’s Poor, which argues for free-market reforms. Any suggestion of altruism — of the wealthy voluntarily contributing to help the less fortunate — is attacked in Sherman’s book as redistributionist and, somehow, therefore “statist.” The idea that Christians might choose to “live simply so that others might have more,” she writes, “makes many Christians receptive to a statist model of development.”
As an example of this “redistributive,” “statist” model, she could have cited the sacrificial, voluntary, personal generosity of Ron Sider’s call for a “graduated tithe” in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. Or she could have cited pretty much any novel ever written by that noted Stalinist Charles Dickens. But Sherman chose, instead, to cite the example of: “… a poem that circulated in the urban ministry office where I volunteer. The poem begins by noting that if there are seven cookies and eight people …”
My first reaction, reading that, was that it wasn’t a “poem” or anything like a poem. It wasn’t remotely poetical. And my second reaction, of course, was to take issue with the way that a call for voluntary, personal generosity was being mischaracterized as “statist.” (I was only beginning to realize that this was par for the course.)
But then I had my third reaction, which was to realize that something I had written in a loose-leaf Comment Book and in a campus newspaper with a total print run only in the hundreds had resurfaced, years later, as something that was “circulating” through the office of a nonprofit hundreds of miles away. What on earth? How did that happen?
Flash-forward again a few more years and I get a phone call from an old college friend. “Remember that cookie thing?” he asked. He’d just been to a conference in Colorado Springs where one of the presenters, a rep from one of the big evangelical sponsor-a-hungry-child groups had put the thing up as a slide on an overhead projector. I tracked the guy down. He’d gotten it from a colleague who had photocopied it out of a book — another book.
The damned cookie thing — this half-baked, slapdash Comment Book posting of Lefty’s — seemed to have taken on a life of its own. Before e-mail, before the Internet, it had gone viral.
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