Category Archives: Non-fiction

Movies Are Made of Moments

British host Michael Parkinson interviews American actor Jimmy Stewart (and later Stewart’s wife, Gloria)

In the 1973 interview above with British TV presenter Michael Parkinson (1935-2023), actor Jimmy Stewart shares a number of interesting trivia from his life and career. They embarrass him in the beginning by sharing a clip from a romantic musical he did, and then at 9:25 shift to It’s a Wonderful Life. Stewart says the film didn’t do well at the box office, but it’s both his and director Frank Capra’s favorite movie.

He goes on to say he has a theory that “creating moments in movies” is most important. “Nobody knows exactly how it happens. What you should do is prepare yourself as best you can to make these moments happen.” Movies are less about the overall performance and more about moments like George Bailey’s desperation in the bar, crying out to God to show him the way.

I found this interview via Anthony Sacramone, who is very smart and a film buff. He added to Stewart’s comments with moments of his own.

Think about Bogart at the bar. Or the look on Hackman’s face as he sees the woman pushing the baby carriage in the middle of the street under the El. Or the “Ba-da-bing!” scene in The Godfather (or the expression on Michael’s face just before he shoots McCluskey and Sollozzo and changes the trajectory of his life forever). Think about that shot of John Wayne through the doorway as he turns and walks off into the distance in The Searchers. James Dean crying, “You’re tearing me ap-a-a-art!” in Rebel without a Cause. Rocky screaming for Adrian at the big fight’s end.

Christmas Ghost Stories, Music, and Bad Ideas

Frittering. I’ve been sitting here frittering like a River City school boy at a pool hall. It often goes this way, even when I have a good idea to write about. This time I didn’t have a good idea, so let’s share some links.

Christmas Carol: Hope Media Group and Compassion International have produced an audio adaptation of A Christmas Carol with the voices of Sean Astin and John Rhys-Davis. Find it on your podcast platform of choice or on the official website. (via World News Group)

Ghost Stories: Loren Eaton is hosting a storytelling fest for Christmas-related ghost stories. The stories are flash fiction, only 100 words each. My contribution is in another post.

Musical Delight: “What do Armstrong and Waller have in common? Both are artists who dispense joy without compromising their art.”

Machen’s Classic Book: “On topic after topic, Machen demonstrates liberalism’s misunderstanding of the enormity of sin: ‘If sin is so ­trifling a matter as the liberal Church supposes,’ Machen writes, ‘then indeed the curse of God’s law can be taken very lightly, and God can easily let by-gones be by-gones.’ But if God is holy and sin is as the Bible describes it, the state of the sinner is desperate.”

Photo: University of Washington Libraries, “Two skiers on Lyman Glacier near Red Mountain, northwest Chelan County”/ Unsplash

The Office Above the Man, Justice, and Gingerbread

I was thinking about the Roman Republic and Empire lately, and, no, it wasn’t a leftover from the Tik-Tok curiosity the other week. It was for my job, working on a humanities course. The text described how Romans formed their government initially with two political bodies, one restricted to families with old Roman blood, the other for plebians. The plebians pushed for political opportunity and got laws in place that allowed them to stand for election to important offices. This was an important shift from appointing a man of good standing from within the ruling class to establishing an office with legal responsibilities for anyone who holds it. It elevated the law above the man.

Liberty within the law is an important democratic principle. If a governor is just the man in power, he rules in his own interest, and if he’s wise, he will build up the whole region, but if he’s interested only in his own leisure, he will consume what he can for as long as he can at the expense of the people. But if the governor is an office with legal responsibilities and accountabilities, then whoever is put in the office has a public role to fulfill. He is a public servant.

This idea is being threatened by those who wish to redefine us into categories with rights and privileges inherent to those categories. They are working on us to view each other as types, some with innate goodness, some with innate justification, and some with innate wickedness who can do no good apart from submission. It undermines our liberty within the law and argues for those with the right blood lines to take control.

On this subject, I heard a good conversation this week on Cairn University’s defragmenting podcast with the author of Reforming Criminal Justice. Attorney Matthew T. Martens explains how politics has divided terms and concepts incorrectly, and how justice is a matter of Christian love. As host Dr. Keith Plummer puts it, there’s something in this book to ruffle everyone’s feathers, but it sounds like a well-composed argument for respecting our fellow citizens within the responsibilities of the law. Look into the book here.

What else do we have today?

Farming: Here’s an outside list I think you’ll find interesting: 22 Books about Farming, Food and Agricultural Innovations

Ministry: The Gospel Coalition 2023 Book Awards has some good titles, including an encouraging book on “’dechurching,’ why they’re leaving, and how we might thoughtfully engage them.” The media paints its own picture of people leaving the church; the truth is far more complicated and hopeful.

For comparison, look over the 2023 books selected by For the Church.

Gingerbread: The OED offers an interesting etymology of the word “gingerbread,” which is a seasonal food I enjoy year-round.

  • In the 13th century, gingerbread was preserved ginger, spelled as “gingebrad” or “gynbred.”
  • By 1450, the word was recorded as meaning the “cake, pudding, or biscuit” we know of today, though ginger isn’t a key ingredient, if included at all.
  • In the 17th century, it began to be used as slang for money. “Without commission: why, it would never grieve me, If I had got this Ginger-bread” (1625).
  • There’s also an obsolete use from 1664 meaning “superficially attractive,” whether that’s a person, word, or action.

Photo: Socks the Cat Standing Next to the Gingerbread Replica of the White House: 12/05/1993 (The U.S. National Archives, Public Domain)

‘A Short History of Nearly Everything,’ by Bill Bryson

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

Back in the 1970s, one of the most fascinating programs on television was broadcast (in the US) on PBS – a short English series called “Connections,” hosted by James Burke. Burke, a somewhat odd-looking fellow in a sort of leisure suit, took the viewer on a journey through time, tracing how some remote phenomenon in history, like a variety of medieval cargo ship, led through various permutations to the invention of plastics. What made the show work was that Burke kept it down-to-earth (often funny) and related his science to intriguing personalities, events, and places.

I thought of “Connections” often as I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I’d been meaning to read, but hadn’t gotten around to until its 20th anniversary of publication (I got a deal on it; it pays to be patient). The book is a history of science, very, very long, but fascinating from front to back.

Author Bryson alternates his chapters between descriptions of the universe and its laws as we understand them, and the pageant of how humans discovered those laws. What makes the book work is, first of all, his knack for helping the non-scientist think about counterintuitive concepts and massive numbers (“you can get some idea of the proportions if you bear in mind that one atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building”), along with no reluctance at all to showcase the eccentric or petty sides of revered scientists (to his credit, he also likes doing justice to researchers who’ve been elbowed aside by the spotlight-seekers).

The overall goal seems to be to wow the reader with how amazing and complex our universe is (and to admit how much we still don’t know about it). The book is full of Wow! moments. Bryson clearly loves his material, and he’s eager as a kid to share his delight. 400 pages worth.

Being me, I found some things in his narrative that he probably didn’t intend. The incredible complexity of life and its structures seems to me to suggest intelligent design (though Bryson carefully avoids that subject, seeming to pooh-pooh any idea of a Creator. But that approach leaves a lot of questions unanswered – surely as many questions as faith leaves unanswered).

The big problem with A Short History of Nearly Everything – for this reader – was sheer input overload. The information provided includes a lot of doomsday talk – we’re told how likely it is that we’ll collide with an asteroid, or suffer another extinction-level pandemic. When he tried to raise our enthusiasm for environmental causes, I felt more inclined to sit back and say, “Yeah, well, you just told me the Yellowstone Caldera is long overdue to erupt and kill us all; it hardly seems worth the effort.”

Nevertheless, A Short History of Nearly Everything is a tremendous book and well deserving of its classic status (even if some of its science is outdated now). I recommend it highly. You’ll find a lot of arguments for Intelligent Design here, even if that wasn’t the intention.

Are We or Will We Ever Be Free at Last?

Time has vindicated Dr. King. Ultimately it is not Black versus White. It is justice versus injustice, haves versus have-nots. As long as Dr. King talked only about African-Americans he was relatively safe, but when he began to pull poor Whites and poor Blacks together he became a threat to the power and wealth elite. If he had been allowed to live, he might have even been able to articulate the frustrations of today’s shrinking middle class. Thus Brother Martin could have been a prophet of a sizable slice of America. This would have been a formidable challenge, but it was never allowed to materialize.

One of Jesus’s points in the Sermon on the Mount was to seek the kingdom of God first and allow all other worries and legitimate concerns to follow it. Such a kingdom-focus doesn’t sit well with us. We would rather have seeking the kingdom as a consumer spending habit or path to political goals. We would rather settle on being in the best church, denomination, or path (Me against the World) in contrast to others of the same type, even if our path is the one constantly thumping how everyone should just get along. A Christianized humanism may be more comfortable to us than the gospel of Christ’s kingdom.

That’s where this book, Free at Last? The Gospel in the African American Experience, stands. It’s too biblical, too focused on Christ’s kingdom to light the torches of those looking to build a kingdom of their own.

In 1983, Dr. Carl Ellis wrote a book for an African American audience on the state of the church, the history of various Black movements, and how we can move forward. He revised and republished it in 1996 and it was republished as a special edition classic in 2020, which is the edition I read.

Ellis spends most of the book on overviews of different movements and cultural arguments Black leaders have made, both within and without the church, to recognize and defend the honor of African Americans. It offers a high-level framework for understanding decades of history. He gives the most attention to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who disagreed on how to raise the dignity of Black families in a country that wants to either melt away their distinctions or marginalize them.

No one escape Ellis’s criticism because mistakes and bad actors have cropped up on all sides. Some Black leaders have painted Christianity as a White man’s religion, but Ellis separates civil religion and White-centered humanism from the biblical faith and traces these sinful influences through to today. White humanism he defines as a belief that White people and standards are the ultimate references for truth and values, White people being generally unaffected by sin. Many African Americans have adapted this view into a Black humanism, which again, for the churched and unchurched, is not Christianity.

Anything can become an idol, even, perhaps especially, good things. “Afrocentrism is truly magnificent, but it is not magnificent as an absolute. As an absolute, it will infect us with the kind of bigotry we’ve struggled against in others for centuries.”

Ellis notes a point in history when the solution to gaining dignity in American life was the melting pot, everyone blending into the surrounding culture, but the dominant culture rejected African Americans subtly and overtly. If they were to blend in, they would have to be subservient to Whites. That actually didn’t sit well with anyone but the abusers. America isn’t a country that can tolerate a permanent servant class for long. We tell ourselves we are the land of the free and the brave, created equal by the Almighty. Americans of any color won’t be content to stand in the alleyways and watch others parade by.

There are many ideas holding us back. In one chapter, Ellis describes “four prisons of paganism” found in many corners of the world:

  1. Suicidal religion, which attempts to deny reality or numb ourselves to it through various means (sometimes with a “militant shallowness”);
  2. God-bribing religion, which is any manner of attempting to curry favor with the Almighty;
  3. Peekaboo religion, which hides God behind other people or things so our allegiance and obedience can be focused on the other thing and not the Almighty;
  4. Theicidal religion, which includes all attempts to reject God’s existence.

Ellis states Peekaboo religion is a dangerous trend in the Black church for its tendency to revere the pastor (and his wife) more than they should. I’d say many independent White churches do the same thing, but the percentage would be smaller.

To rise above these errors, Ellis calls for creative preaching and church practices. He calls it being a jazz theologian, one who improvises on melodies in performing the truth for contemporary congregations and find new ways to reach our increasingly secular neighbors. His call might have more resonance if he pointed to a new application of truth and history that is working, but he may have wanted to avoid that specifically because he isn’t trying to start a new thing for others to copy. He wants us to know the Lord and His Word and look for ways the people in our area will hear them.

It’s not in the book, but I know Ellis is the head of The Makazi Institute in Virginia, a type of L’Abri fellowship for cultural understanding and engagement. That would be his take as a jazz theologian, not something just anyone could do.

One value of Free at Last? is a 60-page glossary covering many topics referred to in the book as well as many contextual topics not mentioned. I wrote a post about content from this section before.

Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash

Reading report: ‘The Vikings in Britain,’ by Henry Loyn

When commenting on a book not easily available to readers in this country (I ordered my copy from England), it’s probably appropriate to call my review a reading report. Posting this does you no particular good, but I’ve spent a couple days reading the book (which I wanted for research on my Work In Progress), and I’m gonna get a review out of it, by thunder.

The Vikings in Britain by Henry Loyn was published back in 1995, which is a while ago, I must admit, especially in a rapidly expanding field of knowledge. No doubt much of the research in the book has been superseded, but in aggregate it seems to give a pretty good overview.

In fact, what The Vikings in Britain appears to be is a textbook, designed as a broad introduction. Just the facts, so to speak (so far as they can be determined). The material is presented through a combination of chronological and geographic perspectives, which seemed to me a little confusing. The book is, apparently, part of a series entailing certain format constraints, including length, so the prose is pretty dense.

My sad final impression after reading is that it wasn’t much fun. That makes it ideal for the textbook market, I suppose, but in my opinion there’s no excuse for a book about Vikings being boring. (Look at Viking Legacy for a sterling example of engaging historiography and [cough] translation.) If you happen on a copy of The Vikings in Britain, and want to mainline a lot of information in a minimal number of reading hours, this book might be right for you.

Pascal on How People Are Persuaded

In this news recently, we heard from students and presumably responsible adults tout the fictional premises such as supporting Hamas is a human rights cause and Israel has never had a claim to land in the Middle East. News outlets dedicated to printing “the truth” have printed and aired reports from Hamas-approved spokesmen who could pose as objective reporters by the simple fact that they were in American media. Today, a commentator said that people hold to this fiction is not really different from those who hold to some of the other political conspiracy theories we’ve heard from the last presidential election. The facts don’t support their belief, and yet they refuse to change their minds.

I’ve often said this was a matter of trust. Different people trust different sources and voices without much comparison to reality. Maybe a better answer is that they trust their own unexamined conclusions most of all.

From the first section of Pascal’s Pensées, his ninth and tenth thoughts are these:

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

Even if what they’ve discovered is ridiculous, they will likely hold to it better than they will an answer we give them, because it’s their idea. They drew their own conclusion or believe they did. I’ve heard a couple pastors tells stories about one of their children coming to them with a remarkable truth they had discovered in the Word and repeat some of their own words back to them. That’s how it works. Most of us aren’t original thinkers, but we should all learn to think for ourselves.

Now, to our Features Desk for today’s links.

Lost in the Cosmos: “Percy’s philosophy and storytelling both aim at restoring our ability to see ourselves rightly and to make the ineffable curiousness of our consciousness visible once more. He ends this peculiar book with a pair of interconnected science fiction stories—both brief choose-your-own adventures with tragicomic twists. In these tales, he confronts readers with the possibility that the help we really need has already arrived.”

Moral Imagination: In 1997, Justice Scalia said that while remembering the Holocaust is important, “you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.”

C.S. Lewis: In 1952, C.S. Lewis discovered there was a woman at the Court Stairs Hotel who claimed to be his wife.

Welcome to the faith: Ayaan Hirsi Ali finds Christianity more compelling than secular humanism. “That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist.”

What Should a Scholar Do When Civilization Topples?

Clive James’s book of essays called Cultural Amnesia offers a take on a German medieval scholar who wrote influentially on literature and Western civilization. As the Nazi party began to gain power, Ernst Robert Curtius warned of danger to come, but when it did come, Curtius retreated into his scholarly study and said no more. He didn’t directly support the Nazis, but with his silence, one has to wonder where his loyalties settled.

James says many German and French intellectuals prior to WWII wanted to believe they could forge wonderful, cultural bonds high above the dirty politics of their day. He calls this a “wishful, wistful thought.”

Most of our wishful thinking is about what we love. . . . But if we are to learn anything from catastrophe, it is wise to remember what some of the men who shared our passions once forgot. Curtius forgot that continuity is not in itself an inspiration for culture, merely a description of it.

Curtius thought he was doing his humble part to preserve civilization, and it wasn’t worthless work, but the hard chore of cultural preservation was being accomplished by the men in bombers, parachutes, and fatigues. It wasn’t the time to discern the patterns of principles in the past; it was the time to fight for the morals they already had.

Curtius the universal scholar is left looking depressingly restricted, and humanism is left with its besetting weakness on display—the temptation it carries within it to reduce the real world to a fantasy even while presuming to comprehend everything that the world creates.

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p. 159

It’s been another week, hasn’t it? Here are some links to consider.

Legacy Press: Are there any good journalists working for the biggest names in news? “These seven failures from the past few weeks should dispel any benefit of the doubt you have left for the corporate media’s honesty.

Russia: A new book exposes a movement I wish American opinionmakers understood. “Russia is systematically and deliberately instilling in its children hatred, vengefulness, and the desire to kill.

Poetry: William Cowper said, “Despair made amusements necessary, and I found poetry the most agreeable amusement.”

Dostoevsky: John Stamps praises the Michael R. Katz translation of The Brothers Karamazov, calling it thrilling and lively. Katz doesn’t attempt a literal translation but adapts the work to English ears by simplifying the naming convention, cutting back some repetition, and using footnotes instead of endnotes.

Woodlands: Two forest lovers, ages 10 and 8, “have hiked every trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park”—900 miles of hiking.

Photo by David Hawkes on Unsplash

Peace, Long Sought and Fought For

“Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
    preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
    from the throng of evildoers,
who whet their tongues like swords,
    who aim bitter words like arrows,
shooting from ambush at the blameless,
    shooting at him suddenly and without fear.” (Ps. 64:1-4 ESV)

Israel: Israel has fought for peace for decades. Here’s one story of the life-long war:

The occupation of Gaza was a burr, not a territorial benefit. In the decades following the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis moved themselves to the West Bank, to the ancient provinces of Judea and Samaria, the historical home of the Jewish people, where they formed the “settlements” that have caused such controversy. But Jews do not hear the same mystic chords of memory from Gaza, and so efforts to settle them in Gaza to create geopolitical “facts on the ground” never really took root. By the early 2000s, 8,500 Israelis had moved to 21 tiny settlements, in a situation so dangerous that those 8,500 Jewish Gazans had to be guarded by 24,000 Israeli soldiers.

Israel’s enemies: Will the real neo-Nazi please stand up? “Contemporary Marxism is not some secret conspiracy. It is right there in the open telling us what it is and what it wants.”

Novels: Author Richard Russo “discovered that what really interested readers were his stories about growing up with an often-absent father in a declining upstate New York manufacturing community filled with struggling but memorable characters whom some might call ‘deplorables.’” 

Un-cancelation: Timothy L. Jackson, a professor of music theory, seems to be winning his fight against those who would censor him.

Family of C.S. Lewis: What happened to Warnie Lewis after his brother Jack’s death? A new book focuses on his correspondence with a missionary doctor in in Papua New Guinea.

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

County Highway 1.2: The Swifties Edition

“They’re Taylor Swift fans,” the woman cleaning the floor beside me helpfully explains. “They’re very nice, but they leave glitter everywhere.”

Is County Highway, the new newspaper for America written and edited by living human beings, selling out in its second issue or weeding out its readership by publishing a five-page article on Taylor Swift’s Eros concert in Seattle? I can’t say I was prepared to read it, but I did, and taking two pages before getting to Swift herself was helpful. (I shouldn’t say that, because I don’t dislike I’ve heard of her music. I can still a few lines, but as a 50+ year old man, I feel I have better things to listen to, like maybe K-pop.) Writer David Samuels contrasts the messaging in Swift’s concert with the reality of living in Seattle, where cops have no power to handle public harassers and residents learn to ignore all humans around them in an effort to Do No Harm to the ones who’ve intended harm to themselves. The mostly female concert audience affirmed they were cute and deserved better—yeah, that’s the message the city needs to hear. If only music would get them there.

What’s in the rest of this issue? There’s a lengthy piece on Mule Days, “The Greatest Mule Show on Earth,” in Bishop, California, which used to be “one of the biggest agricultural festivals in America.” There’s an essay on logging in July, another on the equinox, and one about a 1986 cookbook called White Trash Cooking–“A Confederate general and a gay man who liked cole slaw have more in common with each other than with a Yankee.”

There’s an article about interviewing one of the men who claim to know Many Important Details about extraterrestrials and UFOs and is both eager and reluctant to share. If you watched some of the congressional hearings on UFOs several weeks ago, you probably saw this guy. Yes, he knew critical details; no, he couldn’t share them openly.

There’s an interesting piece on how GPS changes the way we understand our environment, our local world. Alex Perez has a humorous story about professional wrestling in Puerto Rico. There’s a chilling account of corrupt dealings with Columbian presidents and the Clinton Foundation.

Perhaps the heart of County Highway can be seen in this quote from the essay, “The Bull Calf,” by Sage Radecki.

Trying like hell to fix something we saw as a problem, when in reality, it wasn’t ours to fix. Nature, in all its beauty and sorrows, is something we cannot overcome. It’s simply something we need to make space for. I’m learning this daily here, on the ranch, in our work in the field and my time tending to the garden.

That’s a good word.