A Paul Foth Variety Newsletter

In this issue:

• A compelling case for email newsletters

• Emily Dickinson is very briefly mentioned

• Top 5 spring songs

• Indecipherable handwritten notes

What is this thing?

In my late teens and early twenties I sent regular email newsletters to my friends. I narrated plotless stories, ran ridiculous reader contests, conducted scientific experiments with silica gel packets, reviewed music, provided timely Lynnwood, Washington road construction updates, translated part of the book of Revelation into Dr. Seuss meter, generously offered exclusive Gmail invites, and recommended one onomatopoeia in each rich text peppered issue. It became a minor phenomenon, with friends of friends, whom I had never met, on the email list.

Years later I sent a different newsletter during my time working at Tierra Nueva among migrant farmworkers, prison inmates and other struggling folks in Washington’s Skagit Valley. These were usually spiritual meditations, stories, and recounted conversations and interactions in jail and on the streets.

Now I’m a married father of a toddler, leading bird tours in small-town Canada, immersed in religious history scholarship, and collecting back tattoos of 19^th -century US Presidents and Chinese zodiac symbols. On a visit back to the Seattle area, an old Spanish class buddy (who high school Pablo called “Mormon Dave”) urged me to bring back the newsletter—the first one.

“But I don’t think I can generate that kind of comedy these days,” I protested.

“It’s okay to talk about all the things you’re interested in now,” Dave replied. “Your audience matured too.”

In acknowledgement of his airtight argument, I’ve taken Dave up on the challenge. What follows is an interactive jumble of bird puns, amateur philosophy, literature recommendations, snippets of religious history, metaphysical mad libs, grammatical curmudgeonry, warbler migration wagers, preachy penal reform pieces and Simone Weil fan fiction. It will be something like this exciting reading selection in our family's bathroom:

I plan to send newsletter issues somewhere between monthly and quarterly. I would like to bring the ideas that have captured my thought and imagination into conversation with folks that I’ve known over the years.

I will sometimes touch on religious issues variously as a scholar, participant, skeptic, and lifelong learner, but I’ll try to remain accessible to anyone, whether Pentecostal, Hutterite, Sufi, Theravada Buddhist, Sikh, indecisive agnostic, Marxist atheist, Swedenborgian, vaguely spiritual late capitalist consumer, or aspiring cult leader. I make no such concessions for bird content.

Topic suggestions? Burning questions? Are you working on something interesting? Do you have a story to share with the “masses”? A cherished onomatopoeia? You know where I check email!

The Thing with Feathers—a podcast and a song

No educated white guy can resist the magnetic pull of podcasts forever. I joined birder and pastor Courtney Ellis on the The Thing with Feathers podcast about birding and spirituality. We talked about harsh BC Interior winters, the ocean, Saint Francis if Assisi, Snow Buntings, forest fires, Plato, my brother Kevin, Sharp-tailed Grouse, John Stott, bird surveying, and woodpeckers. (I have Ted Goshaluk to thank for the tip about John Stott and Ken McKenzie for the local information about Sharp-tailed Grouse). You can listen here.

The podcast title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem. Nashville songwriter Julie Lee has a beautiful and understated musical interpretation of the poem.

Top 5 jams for springtime: songbird edition

As spring songbird migration is underway, I offer my list of the finest feathered falsettos, the maestros of the syrinx, the spectral sirens of springtime.

1. Black-headed Grosbeak. This bright, striking cardinalid’s song has been likened to a drunk robin. Well, the whiskey did it some good. These extended doubled slurs are gorgeous and heart-wrenching. Highly recommended!

2. Western Meadowlark. When in late March an early Meadowlark sang over a local snowy hillside, immediately I was transported to a pasture in summer, grass seeds in my shoes, sweat on my back, but the sweetest of melodies in my ear.

3. Winter Wren. These little brown jobs pack some virtuosic pipes. Their cascading gallop of trills brightens the eastern woodlands. The formerly conspecific Pacific Wren of the coastal wet cedar forest underbrush is wonderful too, but the Winter Wren’s song is just a little sweeter.

4. Hermit Thrush. I am near the tree line, huffing my way up to a panorama of rocky peaks. A clear single note echoes over the spruces, followed by a delightful descending jumble of sound. Hermit Thrush: the subalpine sentinel. (Much respect is also due its cousins’ harmonic masterpieces: the rising, looping song of the Swainson’s Thrush and the inverted descending ring of the Veery).

5. Brown-headed Cowbird. This is possibly the most hated bird among American and Canadian birders for its predatory egg laying habits. But its otherworldly, space invader glitches are unrivaled.

What is a syrinx, you ask? Far superior to the human larynx, birds have doubled vocal cords positioned close to their lungs, endowing them with their piercing vocal power and wide range of harmonic possibilities.

This sonogram of a Hermit Thrush call shows its layered simultaneous sonic tones (the vertical axis). There is a choir inside each bird.

Paul had a research idea. You’ll never guess what happened next!

A covert book review

A few times in my graduate studies I searched for a book or article that did not exist. These missing studies occasionally went on my ever-expanding list of writing ideas. After learning about influence from Latin American theologians on the 1970s and 1980s American evangelical left, in Asbury historian David Schwartz’s book Moral Minority, I started thinking about other underappreciated lines of influence from the majority world (or so-called “Third World”) to American Christianity. I grew up seeing the influence of global evangelicalism on American-heavy global mission networks. I had read how international students and stories relayed by missionaries in Latin America influenced Vineyard leader John Wimber and independent charismatic godfather C. Peter Wagner in their adoption of charismatic practices. I also thought of the networking of breakaway conservative Episcopalians with African Anglican clergy. I wrote some brief thoughts for a “Hey, have you considered these examples?” sort of historiography paper.

I recently discovered that David Swartz wrote that very book with detailed chapters about each of those themes and several more. Facing West investigates these transnational connections from 1950s American foreign missions to the eruption of evangelical anti-sex-trafficking organizations in the 2000s. Swartz highlights neglected accounts of non-Western leaders who shaped American evangelical culture. The cover photo, for example, shows Kyung-Chik Han, the South Korean co-founder of World Vision, who is overshadowed in most accounts by the American evangelical Bob Pierce. Swartz explores the protests from Latino theologians Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar over the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization’s neglect of social issues; their advocacy shaped the future ideology and practice of these missionary networks (with some help from avid birder and influential British evangelical gatekeeper John Stott). Swartz provides nuanced context for importation of prosperity ideology ideas and “spiritual mapping” practices of spiritual warfare prayer into the American charismatic and Pentecostal worlds. In each topic Swartz’s account avoids the ideological stereotyping and romanticization that conservatives and progressives alike can fall into when depicting non-Western Christians. I happily recommend Swartz’s book for a less American-centric story of this American and global religious culture.

Discussions

Future newsletter issues will involve questions for discussion, contests, and 20% marks for participation.

For the inaugural issue, let me know what you are up to these days. And if you have anything you would like to share with others (a book, a song, an original recipe, a child-rearing accomplishment, an acrostic poem, a docudrama, a family restaurant promotion, a baseball blog, a dissertation, a triathlon record, a heartening word), I’ll have features on what my friends are doing in future issues.

Coming soon (maybe)

• Alexandrian adventure legends in medieval historical fiction

• “The fundamental question” according to Heidegger (via Leibniz and Wittgenstein): why is there anything at all?

• A field guide to identifying bird songs by 70s/80s/90s saxophone riffs

• Revisiting my thesis topic: American evangelical appropriations of Saint Francis of Assisi

• A ranked list of the best time signatures (this topic is a solid 7/8)

• Two years of birding in Walker Valley, 108 Mile Ranch, BC

• The wild world of 13th and 14th-century Joachite and Franciscan apocalypticism

• Why scholars, journalists, pastors and laity argue about the meaning of “evangelical,” “fundamentalist,” and other long adjectives

• Camouflage as a cultural marker in 100 Mile House, BC

• The essential guide to ptarmigan pronunciation

• Processing charismatic spirituality 15 years later

• Interesting things that my friends do (please let me know!)

Until then…

Stuff of the issue

• Onomatopoeia: Ga-lunk

• Bird insult: Northern Beardless Tyrannulet

• Book: David Graeber and David Wengrow – The Dawn of Everything

• Highbrow takedown: “To be attracted by the Platonic dialogue, the horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers.” – Nietzsche, 1888

• Leaf type: Loblate

• Song: The Mountain Goats – Rain in Soho

• Birding hotspot: Rosario Beach, Fidalgo Island, WA

-Paul