Category: Books and Literature

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Projecting our own problems onto others

Anyone who has spent much time in introspection has probably realized that we are most critical of other people that are the most like us. We see something in ourselves that we hate – something we put a lot of effort into to overcome, and when we see this same thing in another person, we are quick to jump on it. It’s the thing about them that bothers us the most. We may be able to easily brush off other annoying or offensive things that person does, but if it’s one of our own issues too, rather than feel sympathetic, we are more likely to find fault.

In his book Simply Christian, N.T. Wright brings this up at points out how it can pollute our charity and good intentions:

I remember the shock when I saw an old “cowboys and Indians” movie and realized that when I was young, I – like most of my contemporaries – would have gone along unquestioningly with the assumption that cowboys where basically good and Indians basically bad. The world has woken up to the reality of racial prejudice since then; but getting rid of it is like squashing the air out of a balloon. You deal with one corner only to find it popping up somewhere else. The world got together over apartheid and said, “This won’t do”; but at least some of the moral energy came from what the psychologists call projection – that is, condemning someone else for something we are doing ourselves. Rebuking someone on the other side of the world (while ignoring the same problems back home) is very convenient, and it provides a deep but spurious sense of moral satisfaction. (p.7)

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Capon on onions

Robert Capon was an Episcopal priest and author, usually writing about theological matters. He also loved to cook, so he wrote a very unusual cookbook called The Supper of the Lamb. It does have recipes in it, but also many pages of steam-of-consciousness writing that ranges from kitchen techniques, natural beauty, theology, and so forth.

In the first chapter, he begins to tell us how to slice up an onion:

Next take one of the onions (preferably the best-looking), a paring knife, and a cutting board and sit down at the kitchen table. Do not attempt to stand at a counter through these opening measures. In fact, to do it justice, you should arrange to have sixty minutes or so free for this part of the exercise. Admittedly, spending an hour in the society of an onion may be something you have never done before. You feel, perhaps, a certain resistance to the project. Please don’t. As I shall show later, a number of highly profitable members of the race have undertaken it before you. Onions are excellent company.

And he goes on like this for 3-4 more pages before the onion is actually cut up and we can move along to the taters. Seriously. I guess that is why he says to set aside an entire hour for this the first time around.

A fascinating book, but you have to be in the right mood!

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Excellent Prose

I finished reading Peace Like a River by Leif Engle not long ago. My wife had told me it was really good after devouring it in one day during a trip to Seattle last year. In fact, it’s been one of the only books I’ve ever purchased for her as a gift that was a big hit. I’ve often misjudged. Tonight, she started reading it again and commenting on how good the prose was. Good compared to what? Compared to the amateurish writing in one of my favorite fantasy novels when I was a child, that’s what. And a lot of other things too.

I used to eat up in everything in Raymond Feist’s many volumes detailing the lives of kings and wizards in his world of Midkemia. That all started with Magician. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the writing in those books is incredibly bad. I’m not talking about the story. It’s pretty cool. Some of the characters are pretty interesting too. But the actual writing, the prose, the descriptions, the dialogs, the imagery – it’s junk. I could write that stuff. If I did try to write a novel, I probably would end up writing that stuff. But not Leif Enger. His writing is amazing.

OK. So just about anybody is better than the writing of a lesser-known fantasy smith who used to design board games. How about the famous Umberto Eco? His The Name of the Rose is held up as a masterwork of contemporary literature. And it’s really good. But it’s got nothing on Leif Enger’s stuff. He can turn a sentence in such a way that makes you feel like you are there – like you are looking into the heart of the character, even though he is just describing them eating their oatmeal in the morning. To cut Eco some slack though, I realize that he wrote the book in Italian before it was translated…

Anyway, back to Peace Like a River. It’s a novel. It takes place in the midwest U.S. during the 1950s. It has the feel of a western. The story kicks off really well but then stalls about halfway through. It picks up at the end though. The plot and characters are OK, but that’s not why the book is great. The book is great for passages like this, where the protagonist’s young sister is introduced:

And then to school, where I swam upstream through geography and grammar and where Swede, who disliked long division, tried to win her teacher’s favor by composing heroic verse. What was Miss Nelson supposed to think when Swede, dimpled and blond, coming up on nine year old, handed in a peom like “Sunny Sundown Delivers the Payroll”?

The men who worked the Redtail Mine were fed up with the boss.
They swarmed around his office door like blackflies round a hoss.
“No wages these three months!” one cried. “Let’s hang the lousy rat!
He’ll starve our very children, boys, while he himself gets fat!”
And true enough, behind the door, a fat man shook and wept;
The wobbling bags beneath his eyes said this man hadn’t slept.
A messenger had brought him word that made him feel his age:
Valdez, last night – the third straight month! – had robbed the payroll stage…

Swede had lost her heart to the West early on, something that gave Dad no end of delight. He supplied her with frayed Zane Grey paperbacks thrown out by the school library, Wilderness Trek and Robber’s Roost and of necessity Riders of the Purple Sage. Swede popped them down like Raisinets. You have to admit she learned the language.

Now, if it was Fiest writing at the beginning of his career, it would have come out like this:

Reuben’s sister Swede wasn’t good at math, but she liked to write. She had a Clint Eastwood poster on her wall and was always asking her mom for a horse. When she didn’t get one, she took up writing about horses and the things that went with them. Like cowboys. Cowboys with +2 attack six-shooters and 100 hit points. She was in the fourth grade.

Eco might have put it this way:

Reuben descended the stairway in good humor. While waiting for suppertime, he came upon his beloved sister, seated at the kitchen table, having procured several cookies from the larder. “I’ve written an opening to my new epic, brother.” she pronounced. Swede was young, not yet in her tenth year, but well versed in the lore of the horse lords across the sea. Regrettably, her enthusiasm to travel there had been dampened by her father’s being summoned to the synod of 1482 in Wiems, where a great many heresy’s were bought to light…

(About six pages of largely irrelevant back-story later…)

She threw back her blond hair as she cleared her throat and began to speak.

An improvement, of sorts. I guess.

So check out Peace Like a River. You’ll dig it. Read it slow so you don’t miss the wonderful words. I think Enger has a new book out too. Maybe I’ll pick up that one some time. I wouldn’t have known what I was missing beforehand.

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Book Review: Simply Christian

About a year ago, I heard a brilliant 1 hour interview with N.T. Wright about his new book Simply Christian. It’s meant to be a introduction to Christianity and a basic apologetic in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I’m not sure why I put this one off so long, but I finally got a hold of a copy and read through it this week.

My verdict is that Mere Christianity still quite a bit better, though Simply Christian has some very excellent sections. Just like Lewis, Wright approaches spirituality in general and then gradually brings in central Christian beliefs and finally church mechanics. In the middle section on Jesus, Lewis stays calm and concise where Wright gets a little bit too excited and tries to deal with too many things at once. Nevertheless, his chapters discussing our desire for beauty are a really excellent and an angle completely missing from Lewis’s work. His concise overview of scripture (The Book God Breathed) is also quite useful. He doesn’t get hung up on any details.

Anyway, the book is definitely worth reading, regardless of where you are on your journey to or in Christianity. It turns out all of the very best parts were quoted in the interview I originally listed to. Smart guy. This extended excerpt begins one of my favorite parts:

One day, rummaging through a dusty old attic in a small Austrian town, a collector comes across a faded manuscript containing many pages of music. It is written for the piano. Curious, he takes it to a dealer. The dealer phones a friend, who appears half an hour later. When he sees the music he becomes excited, then puzzled. This looks like the handwriting of Mozart himself, but it isn’t a well-known piece. In fact, he’s never heard it. More phone calls. More excitement. More consultations,. It really does seem to be Mozart. And, though some parts seem distantly familiar, it doesn’t correspond to anything already known in his works.

Before long, someone is sitting at a piano. The collector stands close by, not wanting to see his precious find damaged as the pianist turns the pages. But then comes a fresh surprise. Te music is wonderful. It’s just the sort of thing Mozart would have written. It’s energetic and elgiac by turns; it’s got subtle harmonic shifts, some splendid tunes, and a ringing finale. But it seems…incomplete. There are places where nothing much seems to be happening, where the piano is simply marking time. There are other places where the writing is faded and it isn’t quite clear, but it looks as though the composer has indicated, not just one or two bars rest, but a much longer pause.

Gradually the truth dawns on the excited little group. What they are looking at is indeed by Mozart. It is indeed beautiful. But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments. By itself it is frustratingly incomplete. A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue. The piano music is al there is, a signpost to something that was there once and mght still turn up one day. There must have been a complete work of art which would now, without additional sheet music, be almost impossible to reconstruct; they don’t know if the piano was to accompany an oboe or a bassoon, a violin or a cell, or perhaps a full string quartet or some other combination of instruments. If those other parts could be found, they would make complete sense of the incomplete beauty contained in the faded scribble of genius now before them.

This is the position we are in when confronted by beauty. The world is full of beauty, but the beauty is incomplete. Our puzzlement about what beauty is, what it means, and what (if anything) it is there FOR is the inevitable result of looking at one part of a larger whole. Beauty, in other words, is another echo of a voice – a voice which (from the evidence before us) might be saying one of several different things, but which, were we to hear it in all its fullness, would make sense of what we presently see ad hear and know and love and call “beautiful.”

…Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers. We photograph the sunset, but all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself. We buy the recording, but the symphony says something different when we listen to it at home. We climb the mountain, and though the view from the summit is indeed magnificent, it leaves us wanting more; even if we could build a house there and gaze all day at the scene, the itch wouldn’t go away. Indeed, the beauty sometimes seems to be in the itching itself, the sense of longing, the kind of pleasure which is exquisite and yet leaves us unsatisfied.

Wright goes on to explain how this unmet longing is actually the voice of our creator God calling to us. Goooooood stuff.

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Beating up Plato

I’ve never read a philosophy book before. Really. I’ve skirted the subject with some of my interests in theology and psychology, but I’ve never jumped straight into one. With Rene Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, I’ll be attempting just that.

I’ve once heard that virtually all western thought is simply a footnote to Plato, and I’m beginning to see what is meant by that quote. So much of modern thought has just assumed all these things that Plato said were true and it’s proponents start with that assumption. Unfortunately, Plato’s ideas were NOT Christian and certainly not trinitarian. The fact that we as Christians continue to hold on to his ideas about metaphysics is actually a huger barrier to our understanding the Bible.

The main Platonic idea I’m talking about of course is the idea that the soul and body are completely separate entities. The soul is immortal. Our body is dust. Our body is just a container for our soul. The soul is good, the flesh is fallen and passing away. Sound familiar? I think I’ve heard this in church before. Except that’s actually not in the Bible. Not at all. This is not the basis of a sound theology of heaven and life after death. This is not the basis for understanding the incarnation and who Jesus is. This is not the basis for our approach to the future and the end of the world. But we are so used to this idea, it’s very hard to part with it.

(Plato on the far left. Not me on the far right. Photo credit.)

In beginning this book, I’m struck by how much the author has in common with N.T. Wright. Both of them feel it necessary to beat up Plato with a big stick before they can move forward with their discussion. They see this faulty idea as being a key thing that is holding us back from growing in our understanding of eschatology and life after death (in Wright’s case) and in religion and social relations in general (in Girard’s case). Girard is also a Christian, but he approaches many of these deep theological from a completely different angle then I am used to hearing. He doesn’t start by exegeting verses from the New Testament, but instead attempts to articulate a more global theory of religion and then work gradually inside from that to Jesus and why he is such a big deal. I’m looking forward to working through this one.

Since the attempt to understand religion on the basis of philosophy has failed, we ought to try the reverse method and read philosophy in light of religion.

-Rene Girard

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Book Review: Travelling Mercies

I was originally drawn to reading something by Anne Lamott after seeing potent quotes from her referenced in other works. Things like:

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

So while I was in Boston for work a few months ago, I saw her memoir Travelling Mercies for only $2 at a really fine used bookstore just off of Harvard. Now, Lamott is like no one I had ever read before: A liberal, dread-lock wearing feminist activist. I’d spent most of my life growing up in the company of conservatives who wouldn’t touch an author like this with a ten-foot pole. So here is the part where I say my eyes were opened and I gained fascinating insight into a different perspective on faith… Except that I can’t say that. Actually, I wasn’t all that impressed. Lamott is a funny and ironic writer and some of her stories from the book were enjoyable to read. I think she clearly has a handle on the fundamentals of who Jesus is and the nature of grace. Nevertheless, I tired of her frequent detailed descriptions of how bad her drinking problem was before she found Jesus. I don’t think I need to write anymore about it since this one reviewer on Amazon described it very accurately:

About midway through the book, Lamott reads a review of a lecture of hers that described her as “narcissistic”, and that, I think, hits the nail pretty much on the head. It’s not that one cannot find inspiration here, or humor, or compassion; the main difficulty in Traveling Mercies is that the essays are so consistently self-absorbed as to miss many of the lessons she could have learned were she able to get beyond herself even a little bit. So we have her chalking up as a minor miracle her being able to play the `bon vivant’ with a fellow air-traveler who happens to be of a religious and political persuasion at which she would normally have sneered; it never seems to occur to her, however, that were the shoe on the other foot (as in: “I actually talked to a feminist today, and even though she’s spreading Satan’s lies, she really wasn’t all that bad!”), the essay would have read as intolerably patronizing.

Anyway, the next book like this that comes along will need to be a little more highly recommended. There is so much to read and so little time!

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You could fill a lot of books…

You could fill a book – a lot of books – with things Dad doesn’t know. And they have!
-Remy, Ratatouille

Well, I’ve been plowing through all my notes on N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It reminds me again of how minuscule my own biblical and historical scholarship really is. I’d grown up going to church and reading the bible every day (or at least most days). I’ve read through the whole thing several times and certain sections of it (like much of John) more than I can count. I’d heard lots of sermons on Jesus and the resurrection. I’d even heard some teaching that tried to fill out the picture with some “outside” material like writings from Josephus. I guess I always had been taught or imagined this great BIBLE from 2000 years ago… and then not much else was written worth reading until the reformers came along.

Grinding through Bishop Wright’s tome was like growing up in the backwoods and reading all the books in our tiny public library and then being thrown into the atrium of the Library of Congress. Wright fills out the context of Jesus’ ministry and the early church’s understanding of him by meticulously pouring through many period writings, including:

The Apostolic Fathers
1 Clement
2 Clement
Ignatius of Antioch
Polycarp: Letter and Martyrdom
The Didache
Barnabas
The Shepherd of Hermas
Papias
The Epistle to Diognetus

Early Christian Apocrypha
The Ascension of Isaiah
The Apocalypse of Peter
5 Ezra
The Epistula Apostolorum

The Apologists
Justin Martyr
Athenagoras
Theophilus
Minucius Felix

The Great Early Theologians
Tertullian
Irenaeus
Hippolytus
Origen

Early Syriac Christianity
The Odes of Solomon
Tatian
The Acts of Thomas

Gnostic Stuff
The Gospel of Thomas
Epistle to Rheginos
Gosple of Philip
Other Nag Hammadi Treatises
Gospel of the Saviour

I am sad to admit that the only one of these author’s or writings that I had even heard of was Polycarp. Wow. And after all that, the core narrative in the Bible is still the same. I think it has even more meaning having read the testaments of those early Christians who clung to it, just as we do. They may have had understood it differently than we do now (some more than others), but we worship the same risen savior!

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History Repeats Itself

In describing current events in the church as global politics, the main character in Ian Morgan Cron’s book Chasing Francis makes a pretty convincing case that things now aren’t so different from the way they used to be:

Another similarity between the Middle Ages and today has to do with the state of Christendom. In Francis’s day, the church was hemorrhaging credibility; it was seen as hypocritical, untrustworthy, and irrelevant. Some people even wondered if it would survive. Clergy were at the center of all kinds of sexual scandals. It had commercialized Jesus, selling pardons, ecclesiastical offices, and relics. Sermons were either so academic that people couldn’t understand them or they were canned. Popular songs ridiculing the church and clergy could be heard all over Europe. The laity felt used by the professional clergy, as if they were there to serve the institution, not the other way around. The church had also become dangerously entangled in the world of power politics and war…The demise of feudalism and the return of a money economy brought the rise of the merchant class and a ferocious spirit of aggressive capitalism. Greed ran riot in the culture. To top it all off, Christians were at war with the Muslims.

Sound at all familiar?

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God: More Poetry than Prose

I’ve never read Walt Whitman’s masterpiece Leaves of Grass, but I came across this excerpt from it in Chasing Francis, by Ian Morgan Cron.

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors – after the scientists, the chemists, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet, worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come, singing his songs.

This is really quite wonderful! God is at once all these things, and we, in his image are reflections of those facets. He is a great captain and warrior. A meticulous engineer and designer, crafting the very fabric and physics of our universe. He created all the foundations of biochemistry and how protein in our cells interact in our bodies to keep us alive. He tossed all the stars and heavenly bodies into space in just such a way and even fashioned our own earth our of many different materials. Finally, he is very concerned about ethics, obedience, but also grace and gifts. He has hard rules of justice written on our conscience from birth, yet in his kindness finds all sorts of ways to break them.

And yet, God is NOT finally about ethics (and I’ll include the rest of philosophy and theology in there too). He is an artist. A painter, a musician, a sculptor, and creative designer. A writer of poetry and not just prose. The arts end up getting closer to explaining/describing God than do any of the other disciplines.

Cron goes on to quote some great commentary by Pope John Paul II on this subject:

In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.

The last part is the best. Even when the message is “converted” into art, it doesn’t lose it’s contents. The Bach B minor Mass surely points to God, even if you don’t understand the German being sung. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel isn’t just illustrations off passages from the Bible. The skill that went into the choice of colors, the lines of the figures – all of it points to the Lord. Good fiction points to God. Must smarter people have explained this all better than I can right now.

One of the character’s in Chasing Francis adds his commentary to this:

The church is realizing that there is an awareness of God sleeping in the basement of the postmodern imagination and they have to awaken it. The arts can do this. All beauty is subversive; it flies under the radar of people’s critical filters and points them to God. As a friend of mine says, “When the front door of the intellect is shut, the back door of the imagination is open.”

The emphasis above is mine.

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Vain Novelties and Rumors

Thomas a Kempis on why you don’t need to surf YouTube all evening:

If thou wilt withdraw thyself from speaking vainly, and from gadding idly, as also from listening to novelties and rumors, thou shalt find leisure enough and suitable for meditation on good things. (The Imitation of Christ, Ch. 20)